I’m sure by now you will have noticed if you use native twitter that you can no longer see the type of service you have used to send your tweets. Third-party clients such as TweetDeck, HootSuite, Twitter for iPhone etc. no longer have their text displayed with a link to their service underneath a tweet, or even if you click through to ‘Details’.

This continues the campaign from Twitter to limit access to the site for third-party developers. This is clearly bad news for third-party apps that now lose out on advertising on the platform by their own users, but also just shows how they are under the mercy of Twitter, who can change their API to restrict the access to these applications.

Having influential users being seen to be using the applications was a powerful form of advertising. It helped users find new apps to use with different features that a user they respected also used. Why wouldn’t you try using it too? However the value of some of these features have almost been nullified as twitter.com has incorporated many of them.

I always want to know what apps people have used to tweet from. Not only to find new ones, but it also often gives me context to tweets, for example if it is sent from a mobile app, or apps that allow for scheduling such as timely or buffer. I often made judgements on the user and their tweets by the app used!

This will also make it more difficult to know whether tweets have been automated from feeds through apps such as Twitterfeed, which again is frustrating as you do not know whether the tweet is genuine and been sent by a user in real time. So it makes it easier for users to fill their timelines with tweets not contributed by them to be taken as genuine.

People rely on using Twitter through their favourite client. Here at Reach Further we rely on clients such as HootSuite and Echofon for our Twitter use, and have become so familiar with them, that they are our main uses for Twitter.

However it is of course understandable that Twitter wants to encourage people to only access Twitter from their own site and not advertise other applications. In particular in relation to generating revenue from advertising, which is ever-increasing on Twitter.com.

Developers are already not happy at Twitters attempts to restrict third-party access, and this is another sign of yet further to come.