Twitter’s changes to its API (application programming interface — the software code that Twitter publishes publicly so third party developers can build apps that interact with Twitter) have claimed another victim: News.me, the social news app from New York tech laboratory Betaworks, has been yanked from the Apple App Store, as News.me announced in a blog post Wednesday.
As News.me’s General Manager Jake Levine wrote:
When Twitter rolled out its latest API guidelines, the News.me apps were deemed to be in violation of the new Display Requirements. We had a decision to make: invest meaningful resources in the News.me apps to meet the new Requirements, or pull the apps from the App Store.
Here’s what it comes down to: we don’t want to invest time and energy into an application that competes with a platform on which it relies.
The News.me team will now focus fully on a recent Betaworks acquisition that they just relaunched:Digg.
Twitter’s API changes — which the company says have been made to create more consistency and simplicity across Twitter products and third-party apps — have also resulted in the dissolution of LinkedIn’s built-in Twitter client and the “Find Twitter” contacts feature on Instagram and Tumblr.