The recent policy changes to twitter's API have not gone unnoticed with developers of clients for the micro blogging service.

The writing is on the wall. The months, if not years of your hard work are slowly being subordinated by twitter's inherent need to control their environment to make money.

Nothing wrong with making money, but the tea leaves say you won't be on the receiving end forever.

RSS pioneering developers Brent Simmons and Dave Winer both see the risk and the opportunity here, as do I

I've been hedging bets on my microbloging for years by maintaining a copy of my tweets in html and as an RSS feed by using free software. I also have a second feed that I don't feed into twitter, since I don't know what they do with my information, and I cocnsider that too risky

To all developers of twitter clients some free advice, take it for what it's worth:

Add RSS capabilties to your client

Allow users to 'follow' RSS feeds [in app subscription is at YOUR fingertips]

Use the 'source' element to enable in-app following of new feeds that users discover from other feeds they follow

Make use of OPML to maintain [portable] subscription lists

Use rssCloud to create a real-time experience

Start creating an RSS shadow feed of their tweets like I do, as an archive and 'Plan B' scenario

Implement the proposed RSS Re-Tweet standard

Have a look at the microblog namespace

The first Twitter client with RSS feed aggregation out of the gate will have a huge first mover advantage. Who wouldn't want to be able to have feeds [and even podcasts] inthe same UI as their tweets? I know I would.

Here's an example of what I would like to see in an app, running on my own server. See how This is also where I get my incoming twitter stream?

Imagine the possibilities...

[postscript] Developing an aggregator is not trivial, not all feeds are created equal (although they should be), but at least the core format has been consistent for over 10 years now.