With the evident aim of regulating the manner in which Twitter is accessed by its users, the microblogging service has recently tightened its stranglehold on apps by announcing new, stricter regulations for third-party app developers.

According to the new guidelines, laid down by Twitter on its official blog on Thursday, a restriction of a maximum of 100,000 users has been imposed on independent software developers who create new Twitter apps.

However, for the current apps with over 100,000 users, the user base can be increased two-fold by the developers, till the time a hard cap on user base is announced by Twitter.

The new guidelines introduced by Twitter are already being criticized by "power-users" as well as software developers because even though the new rules will have no immediate effect on the use of Twitter by the users, the restrictions introduced by the company will certainly discourage independent software developers from creating Twitter apps.

As such, with new rules in place by Twitter, users will apparently be shoved towards the microblogging service's own apps; thereby sounding the death knell, gradually, for the well-liked third-party clients like Tweetbot and Echofon.

Meanwhile, with stricter regulations in place for the independent software developers' community, Twitter is hopeful that it will be able to offer more interactive content - and even serve ads better and gauge their performance - if officially approved programs are used by notable majority users for logging into the microblogging service.