More on Twitter's OAuth policy

Marco Arment put up a devil's advocate piece about Twitter's decision to implement OAuth instead of xAuth for 3rd-party Twitter clients:

There’s actually a very good, pragmatic, non-evil reason for them to do this: they want to make sure that people know what permissions they’re granting the app before they click that big green OAuth “Allow” button, and the xAuth flows used so far in most clients don’t give Twitter a chance to explain to users what level of access is being granted. In other words, Twitter wants to control the messaging. And that’s understandable, although misguided.

He makes a few solid points, namely the fact that Twitter is a private service that really owes the public nothing, but I still can't help but feel that this whole thing stinks of anti-competitive business practice. As Marco himself puts it, this "is definitely a dick move."