This time it looks Twitter has chosen to take punitive action action against services proliferating spamming on twitter.
The change in policy is specially for API users and this time Tweetlater is the casualty. Tweetlater has been providing Direct Message(DM) Feature to all its users providing them an opportunity to send direct messages to user whenever they start to follow them.
This service was widely used by bloggers and marketers to drive traffic to their sites.This also resulted in hue and cry by twitterers as every follow was accompanied by a personalized Automatic DM.
In a letter tweetlater pronounced,
It is with regret that we have to inform you that we are discontinuing the Broadcast DM feature.
One day suddenly we started getting complaints from folks that the DM was not reaching all their followers. we investigated and found that Twitter was rate limiting the DMs.
We spoke with Twitter and we reached an agreement that the DMs could go through if they were sent no more than once every 7 days. we made the code changes on my side and so did they on their side, and everything went well again.
And then came the big spam influx and the worm attacks, and the Twitter world changed.
Understandably, they greatly expanded their anti-spam algorithms. In the process the DMs were again being rate limited.
We worked with the API team to try and find a way around it, but unfortunately it was not possible.
There was no way they could find to allow Broadcast DMs from our site to go through unhindered without compromising their anti-spam measures.
This action along with implementation of OAuth would seriously weed out spam and security issues on Twitter. Twitter also knows that after going mainstream it has to take strict measures to make the service more vital in future.
