Twitter Adds Nine Companies To The “Nice” List

On Thursday, Twitter added nine new companies, including Adobe Social and Visible Technologies, to its Certified Products Programme (CPP), ensuring their continued well-being.

Participation in the programme means these developers will not share the fate of Lazyworm – the company responsible for the popular free Twitter client Tweetro, which was forced to start charging its users after the introduction of a 100,000 user token limit back in August.

Twitter and friends

Twitter launched the CPP last August, after announcing stricter guidelines on how the Twitter API (Application Programming Interface) could be used. The company changed rules in an obvious attempt to stop third-party clients from taking its revenue, while at the same time encouraging the development of apps dealing with analytics, media integration and the enterprise side of things.

The programme was meant to provide a list of approved applications and make it easier for the business users to plan ahead. “We continually work with programme members in the following verticals to take full advantage of the Twitter platform and innovate to solve business needs,” says Twitter on the CPP page.

However these days, CPP looks more like a list of ‘special friends’ of the company, while the rest of the developer community is left out in the cold.

The nine companies joining CPP are: Adobe Social, Shoutlet, Spredfast, Sprout Social, Percolate, Rallyverse, Sysomos, Simply Measured and Visible Technologies. All of them produce applications and services that fall into one of three categories: engagement, analytics and data resellers.

Twitter had previously said it doesn’t want others to “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.”

When the platform first appeared in 2006, it attracted a vibrant developer community thanks to its open ecosystem. However, the new API rules were widely criticised by the developers, prompting some to say they would stop writing software for Twitter altogether.

Tweetro – a Twitter client aimed primarily at Windows 8 users – was among the most well-known casualties of the new strategy, alongside PeopleBrowsr, the company which is actually suing Twitter for limiting its access to data. “We relied on Twitter’s promise of openness when we invested millions of dollars and thousands of hours of development time,” wrote Jodee Rich, CEO of PeopleBrowsr, back in November.

Earlier in 2012, Twitter ended a three-year partnership with LinkedIn, saying it didn’t want others to dilute its “core experience”.

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