Costolo’s said he didn’t want to be “flip.” Then he said, flippantly, “It’s become a little bit of, you know, ‘I didn’t get my homework done because Twitter changed their API.’” In fact, he said the changes at IFTTT had “absolutely nothing to do with any changes to our API.”

We went into these issues in an earlier post, where we wrote that IFTTT appears to have been in violation of Twitter’s API for months.

Beyond the specific details of the IFTTT situation, Costolo was also asked if Twitter’s API changes are part of a general trend away from online openness. On the big issue, Costolo said he disagreed, and that people are always making generalizations like this based on “too few data points.” On the question of Twitter’s openness, he said, “We continue to spend an extraordinary amount of money providing a free API” that’s being accessed at “a ridiculous rate of queries per second.” As Twitter continues to build out its platform, it will do so in an open way, he added.

How I interpret this for Twitter users:

1. Your tweets belong to Twitter, not you.

2. Therefore, using IFTTT, Evernote, or any other cloud service to store tweets is strictly forbidden by Twitter.

3. Anyone who says that these terms of use are bad is just a whiner. Respect the Twitter!!

All right pie, I'm just going to do this, and if you get eaten it's your own fault.

I think the costs issue is a significant one.

If you are Twitter CEO how much would you pay to support the API?

Even Google charges for most of its APIs.

So charge us.

But don't tell us we're not allowed to save tweets on other cloud services.

And don't tell us that tweets have to be displayed a specific way that depends on relying on an unreliable Twitter service to display it.

And don't tell us that Twitter owns the tweets that we offer.