Tweetbot For Mac is the first app to buckle under Twitter’s new client restrictions

As of August 16th, 2012 any third party Twitter client has a fixed number of tokens. THey have 100k, or if they are already above 100k they can grow to two times the number of tokens they had on that date.

It was believed that Tapbots might be able to do well with such a cap due to the success of their iOS client. However, the caps are ‘per application’. This means that Tapbots has a cap for each of their Tweetbot clients.

Tapbots responded to this change:

Twitter’s latest API Changes means now we have a large but finite limit on the number of user tokens we can get for Tweetbot for Mac. We’ve been working with Twitter over the last few days to try to work around this limit for the duration of the beta but have been unable to come up with a solution that was acceptable to them. Because of this we’ve decided its best for us to pull the alpha.

Here are a few more data points on how the caps work:

• If you login to the same account with the same app on multiple devices that takes a single token from the app’s pool.
• If you login to multiple accounts with the same app, you are using multiple tokens from that app pool.
• If you go on the Twitter website and navigate to Settings -> Apps and hit the “Revoke access” button you are returning one of those tokens back to the app’s pool.
• As of now, tokens don’t expire. If you log in to an application once that token is considered in use until you “Revoke access” to it.

This is the first client to show the influence of the new changes. On The Talk Show, Icon Factory’s Twitterific creator Craig Hockenberry suggested that Tweetbot for Mac might be the first Twitter client that would buckle under the new rules.

If you have the Tweetbot alpha already, consider yourself lucky.

Image Source: Flickr