Unfortunately, the 2.0 social media companies like FB and Twitter quickly realized that if they just gave their data out to whoever asked for it, they’d lose out on all of the ads they could be showing to those people if they forced them to stay siloed on their own platform with an interface that they had complete control over. (Twitter has been especially egregious about this, removing open data formats like RSS feeds and practically destroying the 3rd party app ecosystem by deprecating half of the APIs they used while standing up new APIs that they couldn’t, and building whole new feature sets that never got API access to begin with, like polls.)
Chat services have figured this out too, which is why apps like Adium or Trillium or Pidgin have basically died out (and even a lot of the old interoperability that those apps were built on was essentially a cold war-esque stalemate). Basically, without any sort of stable official endpoints to poll, companies these days are capable of “breaking” their apps by making a constant stream of protocol changes faster than third parties can keep up by reverse-engineering the data that comes across the wire. I can’t imagine wanting to work on an app like Tweetbot if every day I had to reverse-engineer Twitter’s data formats to see how they were deciding to eff things up for me.
