As someone who uses Twitter's APIs heavily, this is both encouraging, and slightly terrifying.

We draw down a lot of data from Twitter. Obviously, we always want more data, so we got in contact with GNIP to see what we could afford (which, in itself took a long time). As it turns out its incredibly expensive, and as a very early startup, we couldn't afford any of their plans. We had no option but to fall back to their standard, free APIs and make do.

There are plenty of people who would happily pay good amounts of money for access to more Twitter data - there really are a million uses for it - however Twitter's current prices are far too high for anything other than a VC funded Silicon Valley startup to afford. I hate to think how many potential startups and cool projects have been killed off instantly simply because Twitter's prices are insane. You can get real-time global stock market tick data for a year for less than Twitter charge per month for access to the decahose.

So, I'm glad to see Twitter being more open about their future plans, and really happy to see they're moving towards a more self-service paid API for those than want and can afford it. I just hope they make it affordable and don't kill off too much in the process. The last thing they need is to upset a lot of developers, again.

Twitter's API has always been something they've not leveraged enough. All they had to do was keep it open, find a way of serving adds through 3rd party clients, and I suspect there would have been an explosion of good clients that could have made Twitter much easier to use for people who just can't figure Twitter out. Twitter shouldn't be complicated, but it is, and by trying to hold onto the brand as tightly as they have, they've prevented good developers from making easy to use clients that could have brought in users.

I really want Twitter to succeed. I hope this is the start of a turnaround for Twitter.