In the light of the recent hire of Kevin Thau, someone with sales and business development experience. The pending rate limit seems to imply a more aggressive twitter.

Could cutting back on API limits be the first steps towards paid access to the API?

The API twitter provides is amazingly simple and, as such, has resulted in a tremendous amount of growth. That growth includes 3rd parties developing applications and business models around the API. These applications can often be stuffed into 2 categories. First, an application that sits directly on top of twitter and provides nothing more then 1 or 2 missing features. Second, being the “aggregator” style applications which attempts to combine twitters features with those of their direct competitors.

It would be hard to see how, beside growth, either of these two types of uses for the API could be seen as a positive for Twitter.

TweetDeck, Twhirl sure! single user, desktop, 100 request limit.

FriendFeed, Tweetree…not so much…

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