Twitter's new API is going to appeal to a certain demographic of developers, to be sure (that is, the more resourceful ones who develop business apps), but clearly the move will perturb the larger percentage working on consumer apps. It seems like a gamble on Twitter's part, but there is logic behind it considering the wholesale adoption of Twitter as a business tool.
It wasn't too many years ago that Twitter was viewed basically as a toy. But once marketers realized its massive potential, things changed. When you hear about big data, in this case, of the unstructured variety, Twitter invariably pops up. There's a very large market now for analytics tools that can sift through millions of tweets and determine customer sentiment.
And along with marketers, Twitter is now becoming a powerful tool in the arsenal of HR professionals and recruitment firms.