It was recently revealed that Twitter has over 500 million users. Now the fat birds of microblogging are planning to virtually pull the plug on many apps and services that have been built around their API with a post about the news yesterday. The closing in of their walled garden is another example of a popular service that is starting to get sick of others making money off of them. Marco Arment gives a great layman’s interpretation of what’s happening here. Phrases such as “choke access”, “pushed developers aside”, and “talk to the hand” have been used to describe this behavior, currently being…

Is Twitter closing down their open API infrastructure to make competitive moves against threats? That certainly seems like a possibility after disavowing much of their relationship with LinkedIn recently and now by blocking Instagram users from pulling their Twitter friends into the photo sharing app that Facebook bought. API integration is what makes many services function. Facebook has been known to block API calls (even from Twitter itself) and Google is famously slow to roll out their own API integrations, including limited access to their own social network, Google+. It’s unclear…

Google’s first entry into social gaming wasn’t spectacular. By allowing a handful of partners to develop, they were only able to yield 16 games total for their social network, Google+. Compare that to bigger sites like Facebook with thousands of games and even smaller sites like Tagged.com who have hundreds of games, Google+ has been a minor blip in the growing social gaming industry. All of that should be changing soon as Google+ announced that they were launching their initial API release. It is much more limited than other platforms, allowing only public data to be used, but it’s a start. They…