Recently Twitter disconnected Instagram so that users are no longer able to discover their friends on Twitter. Yesterday Tumblr became the next victim as Twitter works down the chain of developers that have connected to it. LinkedIn has already become a victim and the betting is that Flipboard will be next. 
This is coupled with recent changes in the developer rules that insist on Twitter content being displayed "as is." See this article from TechCrunch: Twitter Handcuffs Client Apps with New API Changes - by Anthony Ha
I am wondering how long it will be before Wordpress plug-ins that display a twitter stream in the context of a web page are forbidden by Twitter. Those plug-ins would seem to be out of compliance because Wordpress blog pages have comments. As I understand it that is a no-no.
If Twitter follows a strategy to drive consumption of Twitter content on twitter.com then they will devalue the Twitter ecosystem and drive many people away to other services. One of the huge values of Twitter is that we can pull content that is relevant and mash it up with other content.
Twitter is like electricity. The value isn't in the power station at the center of the grid. The value is in the electricity that flows to millions of devices where it enables all manner of things to happen.
