Well it's been sort of clear which way the wind was blowing for a while now, but definitely 3 or 4 years ago Twitter was bursting at the seems with developer support for innovation in all directions. It was an extremely welcoming platform compared to Facebook and iOS. Their developer PR has completely reversed that.
Of course if you're cynical you could have called it from the very beginning, but the point is it wasn't wholly unreasonable to believe that Twitter was willing to let developers capture real value in exchange for becoming gargantuan and providing critical infrastructure (ie. the old changing the world thing). Whereas now it's very very clear that Twitter is not willing to share any significant value. They want to capture it all, and they are adjusting the ToS to put them in a position to cut people off at the knees the minute they smell some value escaping from the ecosystem.
Of course if you're cynical you could have called it from the very beginning, but the point is it wasn't wholly unreasonable to believe that Twitter was willing to let developers capture real value in exchange for becoming gargantuan and providing critical infrastructure (ie. the old changing the world thing). Whereas now it's very very clear that Twitter is not willing to share any significant value. They want to capture it all, and they are adjusting the ToS to put them in a position to cut people off at the knees the minute they smell some value escaping from the ecosystem.