Twitter forbids developers from monitoring its API

Twitter is already coming under intense scrutiny from the developer community, after outlawing the creation of new third party clients and, more recently, suggested that more restrictions are coming, and that’s not likely to be helped by Pingdom stumbling upon a clause within the microblogging service’s API Terms of Service which expressly forbids monitoring of its API. Generally speaking, developers have a vested interest in monitoring APIs, to measure performance trends, gain depth of how it is being used and stay up to date when a service has problems which will affect their apps.

byPC Tech

July 24, 2012

Twitter prefers to provide its own API status update. While that provide updates on all features of service and how they are running, it is significantly more limited that the kind of systems that developers could set up.

Given the efforts (and investment) being ploughed into the Twitter ecosystem, we agree with Pingdom that it’s strange to see that API tracking could see a developer and their app(s) have its API access removed.

Source:TNW