Although it's not much of a surprise, developers of third-party Twitter apps were put on notice Thursday afternoon with a blog post detailing changes to its API that could eventually limit choices for using the microblogging service.

Twitter's Michael Sippey took to the company's developer blog to detail forthcoming changes with the company's API version 1.1, which will "soon introduce stricter guidelines about how the Twitter API is used."

The blog post basically breaks down to three major changes for developers using the Twitter API. The first details that every API request must now be authenticated, a change that developers must implement before March, 2013.

While most developers seem to agree that change is a good one, the other two are considerably more controversial, particularly for those who provide popular third-party apps such as Tweetbot, Twitterriffic and Echofon.

With its second change, Twitter is changing its previous limitation of 350 API calls per hour and will be changing to "per-endpoint rate limiting" with version 1.1.

"Most individual API endpoints will be rate limited at 60 calls per hour per-endpoint," Sippey writes. "Based on analysis of current use of our API, this rate limit will be well above the needs of most applications built against the Twitter API, while protecting our systems from abusive applications."

The final change is the one that has many third-party developers up in arms: Twitter's previous "Display Guidelines" are now "Display Requirements," which essentially forces anyone who makes a Twitter mobile app to conform to the company's "consistent experience" or face having their application key revoked -- which would effectively kill the app in question.

Worse yet, preinstalled client apps now have to be certified by Twitter, while the company is clamping down on how many users a specific app can have -- anyone serving more than 100,000 individual user tokens will have to get Twitter's permission.

Judging from our own Twitter stream, these changes are thus far fairly unpopular, with a number of high-profile tech journalists and developers starting to actively promote their handles on the new crowdfunded Twitter competitor App.net.

Perhaps Daring Fireball's John Gruber said it best: "Don’t even get me started on Twitter turning against client apps. For chrissake, Twitter’s own app started life as a third-party client."

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