I wanted to follow up on a post I made a short while back.  In it I said developers were making a mistake in building startups around the APIs of large companies because they are given no guarantee from those companies.  I further tried to prove that power makes these companies stupid which in turn makes them treat developers badly.  

I used the point to hopefully convince people that it’s time for the IT industry to start demanding contractual agreements from these companies.  That way when you build a startup you’ll have some guarantee from the company saying the service you built it on will continue to function (and as a result all your work won’t go to waste)

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that since then Twitter killed a program named StatTweets…

We’ve all heard the stories about Apple rejecting apps from the iTunes App Store for arbitrary reasons. Now Twitter is raising some hackles for shutting down accounts for no good reason. In this case, the accounts belong to StatTweets, which was created by Robbie Allen, the developer behind sports stat site StatSheet. StatTweets was a way to get sports scores and updates about your favorite NBA, NFL, and college teams.

What did Allen do wrong? Twitter cited violations to its terms of service including “copyright infringement,” “mass account creation,” and “squatting” (you can read all the details on the StatSheet blog).

And Facebook shut down a widget called Newsfeed RSS…

A new Facebook application that allowed users to export the full contents of their stream into an RSS feed has been quickly shut down by Facebook for violating the site’s privacy rules.

Newsfeed RSS was an application developed by Teck Chia that took Facebook’s “Open Stream API” and made the contents a little too open. Here’s the problem: converting users’ Facebook streams into RSS feeds is inherently insecure, because many RSS feed readers make feed URLs public and indexable. That could lead to information Facebook users thought they were only sharing with their Facebook friends ending up in search engine archives forever.

I feel the point is an important one so I’m going to try to pick these stories out as they surface to continue making it.  The important thing to remember about the stories above is that each developer spent probably thousands of dollars worth of time on their respective apps.  Time that was then flushed down the toilet thanks to the company they chose to build their app around.