Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, the writer and philosopher George Santayana said. That’s what Twitter has just done with the outside app developers on the microblogging platform, making a familiar move that threatens to destroy them once again.

Officially citing “technical and business constraints,” Twitter today said it has shut down an application programming interface used by most third-party Twitter apps for things such as push notifications and automatic timeline updates. It claimed that “we’re not changing our rules, or setting out to ‘kill’ 3rd party clients but we are killing, out of operational necessity, some of the legacy APIs that power some features of those clients.”

Further trying to justify the move, Twitter said in an internal email that the API used by third-party clients relied on “legacy technology” that was still in a “beta state” after more than nine years, somehow trying to shift the blame onto others.

Twitter built much of its business off third-party app support until it decided to try to kill off third-party app support in 2011 in an effort to force users to use Twitter’s own apps with the built-in advertising Twitter needed to make money. That move didn’t successfully kill off all third-party apps, with some surviving under strict rules.

Fast forward several years and Twitter figured out, again, that third-party app developers actually helped the service grow. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey first begged for developers to come back and support Twitter in 2015, not coincidentally about the same time Twitter’s growth started to flatline. In 2017, Dorsey tried to pitch a new premium API for third-party app developers, but it didn’t come cheap.

That Twitter would once again cripple popular third-party apps such as Tweetbot and Twitterific does bring into question the morals of a company that has often struggled on various fronts, most recently over Alex Jones.

Certainly going forward, the next time Jack Dorsey tries to appeal to third-party developers to support Twitter, here’s hoping he will be laughed out of the building.

Image: methodshop/Flickr