John Gruber on the new Twitter iPhone app:

Worried, because the flip side of the disintegrating quality of Twitter’s official client software is their growing ambivalence toward third-party clients. Everything’s going to be just fine so long as great apps like Tweetbot, Tweetlogix, Twitterrific, Echofon and so forth are able to serve as unhindered Twitter clients. The question is how long that will be.

Worried indeed. This change is starting to drive Twitter to where everyone knew they had to go at some point, generating revenue. The problem is that many longtime users are upset with the way they are slowly going about it.

The writing is on the wall for these third-party clients to be compromised over the next 18 months. Will that make Twitter more like MySpace and Facebook and cause the hardcore original users to move on to the next thing?