Social-networking site Twitter explicitly told developers to cease making third-party Twitter clients.

Citing repeated privacy policy violations plus an inconsistent user experience, Twitter said it no longer wanted developers to make new twitter client applications.

However, the company added that all of the existing third-party clients, such as TweetDeck, could keep on operating but they will have to comply with its rigorous standards and consistency.

Making the announcement, Twitter's director of platform Ryan Sarver said, “We need to ensure that tweets and tweet actions are rendered in a consistent way so that people have the same experience with tweets no matter what they are.”

As per Twitter, more than 90 per cent of Twitter users are using an official client rather than a third-party one. Twitter has already developed official clients for the iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, Mac OS X and BlackBerry OS.

Experts say that Twitter wants to own the user experience and that is why it wants to prevent the tide of new applications. Currently, as many as 750,000 applications are using the Twitter API.