"the company would soon update its API terms of service to make things official"
Gotta love the Web culture of today.
So Twitter defines a service and Terms Of Use, then, barely a month later changes and breaks everything but without forewarning or even changing its TOS, and nobody has anything to say ?
What kind of management is that where you just go and make changes and, if it sticks, then you change your TOS ?
Does anyone have the slightest notion of what a CONTRACT actually is ?
A contract is an agreement between two parties that engage themselves to the clauses of the contract. Once signed, no clause can be changed without the agreement of BOTH parties.
Frankly, I blame the EULA for implementing this kind of mindset. The EULA is supposed to be a contract, but it's materialized by a web page that can be changed by the company on a whim, without any semblance of acceptance by the customer, and no judge has found anything lacking in the process.
Now we have companies that rip up the contract and make up a new one without consent from anyone else, making things official after the fact.
Then again, this is Twitter we're talking about after all, not something important. But still, I would hardly be surprised if a class-action lawsuit came up. And the complainants would be, in my mind, entirely right.