I've been working on a project lately that uses search APIs and various social APIs to gather information about a given term. I'd like to add Twitter and Facebook and other support, but I worry about things that put me at the mercy of those providers. I would like to think this kind of "maybe I will kill you, maybe I won't" attitude of Twitter and Facebook (in particular, but others also do it) is counter-productive for them, but I guess they have a strong business case for their decisions to cut companies off when those companies start encroaching on turf that Twitter or Facebook thinks of as theirs.
In my ideal reality, we'd have an open Internet free of this kind of near-monopoly on specific types of content. Lots of small, federated, data feeds, and people free to move about between commercial and open options and interconnect regardless of who's hosting the content. But, that Internet is still pretty far off, and maybe getting farther away, as the biggest players build bigger walls to protect their data silos.
Would it be better to modularize your design to allow for multiple search providers, two of which are Facebook and Twitter? Build on them while you can. If, in the future, they decide to kill your access, let your users know. Tell your users how to contact the offending provider. Get a small grass roots movement going.
In the mean time, build something that at its core is yours. Build it out. Make it a following.
In my ideal reality, we'd have an open Internet free of this kind of near-monopoly on specific types of content. Lots of small, federated, data feeds, and people free to move about between commercial and open options and interconnect regardless of who's hosting the content. But, that Internet is still pretty far off, and maybe getting farther away, as the biggest players build bigger walls to protect their data silos.