Links for Friday March 11^th, 2011

• Twitter's new developer roadmap: Dave Winer says that he saw this day coming, and for what it's worth, I believe him.

• Did Twitter just tell client-app developers to stop?: I'm with Brent Simmons as well, this is a sad day for Twitter fans.

• Twitter Drops The Ecosystem Hammer: Don’t Try To Compete With Us On Clients, Focus On Data And Verticals: Bad news on the Twitter front:

  "We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way."

  Translation from PR speak: "We want to start dumping ads all over Twitter, and we can't do it if people are using Twitter clients that we don't control".

• The Maker Of Mario Kart Justifies The Blue Shell: Hideki Konno, on the Blue Shell:

  "With [2008's] Mario Kart Wii, it was to create a race where, up until the finish line, you didn't know. We wanted to create a race where everyone was in it until the end."

  That doesn't mean that the Blue Shell isn't annoying if you are winning the race!

• Revisiting 'Firefly':

  When Fox aired "Firefly," the network chose to air episodes out of order, presumably in an effort to put forward what executives considered the better episodes first. Of course, that decision wrecked Whedon's attempts at character development and also screwed with the show's continuity. I asked Berman if she thought changing the episode order hurt the show and if she'd do it different if she had to do it again.

  "If I had to do it over again, I might have reconsidered it but I'm not sure it would have changed anything," she said. "It was a numbers things. It was a wonderful show and I loved it and I loved working with him on it but that was a big show, a very expensive show and it wasn't delivering the numbers."

  Shortsighted thinking like this is why we can't have nice things.