Twitter's image would be better served by the bandaid-removal approach. Everything bad - all at once, rather than this drip-drip-drip of changes perceived to be hostile towards its developer community. You have to figure they've got a road-map of where this heads, so why not do it all at once and consolidate the pain?
"Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense; benefits ought to be handed ought drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more." - Niccolo Machiavelli
I'm not sure that Twitter can afford to be feared - they need to be loved. Twitter doesn't lord over a Renaissance Italian fiefdom; their serfs can migrate to other city-states at will.
Twitter can't afford to be feated? Sure it can! The only people who could possibly fear twitter are developers. Regular Twitter users mostly don't give a crap. They jump on whatever client they like, Tweet a bit, read a bit, and go about their lives. I really think developers are really overestimating our importance to Twitter at this point. We're a small portion of Twitter's users and they arguably don't need us anymore. We made it popular and better but now they can cut off access to their API completely and replace all third party functionality and our screams would echo in our echo chamber but fall on deaf ears the moment it escaped the chamber. Non-developer users may shed a tear and write an angry blog post but they'll all forget, move on to the new official Twitter apps and the rest of us will still be complaining about it on HN (a couple hundred of us may pay to scream about it on app.net in protest too).
It's not right but it is what it is. I think it's better to accept this now rather than have to deal with our denial later.
Edit: I mentioned they could cut off all functionality. That was hyperbole obviously but they can cut off access to a hefty chunk of the API and replace what third parties are doing nonetheless.
The only problem I have with this as an end user is that Twitter brought out all of these applications and completely ruined them. I was excited for Tweetie and it offered the best Twitter experience hands down, only beat by Tweetie 2. Twitter for Mac was great back in the day too. When Twitter bought Atebits, they stopped touching the Mac app and completely destroyed Tweetie.
I don't care about the 140 character limit, but I do dislike Facebook strongly. Twitter relationships are asymmetrical. I can follow Wil Shipley or Joss Whedon without them having to approve it. Facebook Pages aren't the same either, as they're more of a platform for people to talk about brands, rather than a stream of updates.
Maybe the elite who are willing to pay will migrate to app.net, but even if they do they're going to be set apart from people who don't want to pay $50, which means that even if I do sign up for app.net, I'm also going to have to keep my Twitter account.
Facebook added subscriptions a while back and largely deprecated people Pages (you will, for example, see that Zuckerberg's personal profile can be subscribed to; it isn't a Page, it is his normal profile).
I mentioned this in the Tweetbot thread, but http://rstat.us looks very promising. They syndicate your posts to Twitter, are working on a Twitter-compatible API[1], and use OStatus so are compatible with other services running the protocol (like the somewhat more neglected-looking identi.ca).
Actually I agree with you in this case, given the massive amount of attention on Twitter now, but in situations of lesser scrutiny, the 'drip-drip-drip' is often the the more cunning move.
What's more interesting is that each of these little drips is turning into front page news material. Every time the giant shifts in its sleep, the villagers run amuck.
