My long-time friend and podcasting partner, Manton Reece, is finally saying a painful goodbye to all of his apps that use Twitter’s API. Reacting to Twitter’s recent announcements about full-history search:

I was thrilled by this upgrade to the Twitter service. That the search was so limited for so long was the primary reason I built Tweet Library and Watermark to begin with. Unfortunately, this functionality is only for the official Twitter apps. It will not be made available to third-party developers.

Manton is probably the most earnest developer I know. He is eager and ambitious in his indie pursuits, but always slightly more interested in serving the greater good than in serving his own interests. To me this is a charming, admirable quality, even if it has lead to some inevitable frustrations and disappointment.

It’s easy to imagine how a developer like Manton Reece would have been so eager to participate in the Twitter developer platform of 2007, and how devastating it must have been for him to watch as his ambitions for the platform became less and less viable over time.