I wrote at the start of July about what I saw as the next generation of Twitter. Turns out I didn’t have to wait that long.  Yesterday they announced the coming changes to the API and the chorus of third party developer disapproval began.

The message was pretty basic, if it’s like the Twitter client then you might as well forget it. And that’s not restricted to the small guys in the pond the big guys will be a little edgy at this point too. The nice people at Twitter even gave us a nice image to look at….

Those who know me very well will hear my spout on about data ownership, are you control of your own data. It’s all very well having the app, website or utility out in the open but if don’t own the data you consume then at any time you can have the rug pulled from under your feet. This, my friends, is about to happen on a grand scale.

The client cherry pick is now over (see the top right segment of the image) for Twitter clients, they’re polluting the ecosystem and it’s time stem the flow.

Social analytics and social influence rely, I would wager, on the firehose to get any sense of the data out so there’s money involved. They’ll be safe, those folks will pay money for the data eventually if they aren’t already.

The likes of social CRM and enterprise tools aren’t widely adopted for the simple reason they are a hard sell, it’s not the as knocking up a basic client and getting the viral army to spread the word for downloads.

So the landscape for the next 18 months to 2 years? At a guess the cherry pick will continue and Twitter will look to acquire companies in the other three parts of the quadrant. With a complete toolset then the picture is complete and don’t rule out more API changes in the meantime too, remember you don’t own the data.