I haven't been able to get to the core of this, but it's important enough to be worth flagging. At the centre of it all is an API upgrade by Twitter. Anil Dash takes a Twitter-centric perspective on this: "The big new API call limits come with only a minor change in what's required from you: You'll have to use OAuth for all of your API requests." Now as I recall Google did something like this with the Blogger API a few years ago, and that for me was when it became unusable, because there's a lot of overhead involved in authentication, especially when it's for a simple data request.
Luis Suarez taps into this concern. "Twitter is where conversations go to die... Ever look again into Trending Topics? When was the last time that you didn't find anything related to watching something on TV, or a movie, or a sports event or a celebrity passing away (According to Twitter, at least!) or, you name it. You do know what I am getting at. In a way, Twitter has gone mainstream, but of the worst kind. Twitter has become industrialised." To do this you must control the experience, and the platform, and that's what Twitter is doing with ther API. As did Google, and others before it.
Ben Werdmuller looks at the same issues from another perspective. "Somewhere in the mix, we've lost the control and interactivity that allowed people to use software on their own terms." Dave Winer, meanhile, points to Evan Williams' Medium. "Medium is designed to allow people to choose the level of contribution they prefer." But there still isn't (as Winer says) the easy content-in content-out solution. "Please let Medium be something more than another high-walled silo for capturing people's writing." And then there's Eric Hammer who has quit the OAuth 2.0 specification initiative. "The web does not need yet another security framework. It needs simple, well-defined, and narrowly suited protocols that will lead to improved security and increased interoperability." (Tim Bray responds.)
As always, with API upgrades, the security frameworks, and the attendant overhead are used to lock out competitors. We've been down this road before. OAuth 2.0 implementation is like that. When the overhead becomes too much, a new wave sweeps them aside and starts over with something simple and usable. As Winer writes, "Let's forget about OAuth 2.0. Let the IETF have it. Pop the stack and let's move on." We may be at that moment again.
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