Twitter and their API

I'm sitting here thinking of my Twitter experience today vs my first tweet two years ago and I've about had it with the new social network. After two years of dealing with the growing and evolving Twitter, I've about had enough.

My first experience was TweetDeck on Android and TweetDeck Adobe Air on the PC, and I lived with those applications until about 3 months ago. Lets start with Android, TweetDeck on Android was purchased by Twitter and then never updated. I believe this was some tactic to kill off the popularity to it in hopes of moving users to their own application. The application still had Google Wave in it for a visualization of its old age. Then when Twitter announced the ending of API v1.0, the inevitable panic started. Applications using this old method would cease to work in May of 2013. Granted, this was posted in August of 2012. Tweetdeck never received an update.

So I went on the hunt for a new mobile Twitter application. I'm not going to sit here and document my search or the precise features I require. Long story short, Falcon Pro became my mobile client. With an amazing UI and multiple accounts, it found a place on my home screen removing the once ancient TweetDeck.

This worked great for about a month and half, then the problems started. The developer tweeted that he had exhausted his 100,000 token limit and Twitter refused to increase it. His idea was to "revoke" all the keys and implement more security in hopes for the legitimate users to get tokens over the pirates. This worked for awhile, until a few days ago. Token limit reached again! This means any new install over the Google Play Market would not work, at all. This would immediately introduce charge-backs and 1 star ratings due to the failing product.

So I'm on a sinking ship...again. I downloaded the official Twitter app on Android. Removed it one hour later for my own personal UI / preference and back on Falcon Pro. Twitter refuses to help FalconPro, and I refuse to use the official application.

To make matters work, my new desktop application: MetroTwit seems to be constantly throwing "rate limit exceeded" errors. So now my favorite desktop application doesn't work half the time. All this comes down to is Twitter and their disgusting, developer unfriendly API.

The developers built the hype and popularity around Twitter and now they are being shot in the foot. Obviously money is the only reason for this, yet there are three simple ideas to solve this (in my opinion).

1. Require money for x amount of tokens. Developers pay for tokens, consumers pay for developer's application. 
2. Inject ads into the API. As much as I hate it, inject those ads into the API as a regular tweet timeline. Require that those tweets not be touched or modified as part of the ToS.
3. Drop the "free" limit to 25,000 instead of 100,000 then force purchase of tokens at 25,000+. This is less rogue applications and more serious developers.

If something doesn't happen soon, App.net is looking more pretty :)