On the future of the Twitter API

Matt Mullenweg of Automattic (the WordPress folks) had some dim judgements on the future of the Twitter API outside of Twitter. I wanted to take the opportunity to give a quick update on the future of the Twitter API at StatusNet. What we're doing, and how it's going forward.

1. We're going to continue to support our Twitter-compatible API for the foreseeable future. We've seen a lot of value in it, and our third-party support has definitely benefited.
2. We'll continue to augment it with StatusNet-specific data as we see necessary, obviously trying to avoid any collisions with future Twitter development. We've already added versioning and per-site configuration data, and future versions will include formatted HTML and full links to remote sites and users.
3. We encourage third-party developers to consider supporting the tens of thousands of public and private StatusNet sites on the Web. See StatusNet for Twitter Developers for a good overview.
4. The rest of our software is coalescing around Atom. We use ActivityStreams for OStatus, for example. We plan to roll out support for the Atom Publication Protocol in the next version of our software.
5. We're also building our own StatusNet-focused clients. They currently use the Atom side of the Twitter API, and we're going to build more Atom in to future versions.

 
I generally agree with Matt that we're seeing a big sea-change in desktop and mobile social messaging clients and that the window is closing for third-party developers to branch out.  I think supporting other platforms is a great way for Twitter client devs to parlay their current control of 75% of Twitter's traffic into an ongoing business.