Twitter, Cards, and Developers  

Mike Isaac, reporting on Twitter’s new stance on third-party apps and “consistency” in the ecosystem:

The problem is, there are far more clients than the official ones: Tweetbot, Echofon, Osfoora, all are popular alternatives among many others. And right now, the tweets that use Twitter’s shiny new Card technology don’t show up in their rich new form inside of these third-party clients.

For Twitter, this is awful: The company needs its new, media-rich tweets to appear the same to everyone, not just to those using the official Twitter apps.
This could mean death for those third-party clients.

According to multiple sources, when Twitter decides to finally drop the hammer and introduce the new set of API guidelines, the days of these apps are likely numbered.

What I don’t understand from the article is: will Twitter let developers use Cards? Because I’m fairly certain several developers would prefer to have Cards and stay in the Twitter business, rather than being kicked out for a design choice.