Twitter’s newly fortified mission to “deliver a consistent Twitter experience,” which is FREAKING OUT the tech world right now, will also force some news organizations to re-examine their code.

In a blog post, Michael Sippey, Twitter’s head of consumer products, said the company will crack down on apps that “reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” Think TweetBot, EchoFon, etc. While there’s no Seattle Times-branded Twitter client, changes in the API terms will have a subtler impact on Twitter-powered news apps.

Two of the most important changes: Tweets displayed to users must follow the company’s Display Guidelines, which require “Reply, Retweet, and Favorite action icons must always be visible.” And “No other social or 3rd party actions may be attached to a Tweet.” (Let’s hope Twitter’s next move isn’t to require us to capitalize “tweet.”)

That means news apps like The Washington Post’s @MentionMachine, which tracks presidential candidates on Twitter, will have to be reworked on the front end, where tweets are presented to readers, to match a style similar to Twitter’s own tweet embeds.

“Everything that we do with partners in social and tech is just an evolving scenario,” said Cory Haik, who manages digital projects at the Post. “Bringing that attitude forward is just helpful anyway, because, you know, it’s all subject to change.”

It’s a reminder that anyone who builds a product on a third-party platform, especially a free one, risks losing everything, anytime, on a moment’s notice. Just this morning I received a pitch from a startup called EmbedTree, which “aggregates rich media from Twitter and embeds this content within our site.” Looks cool, good idea, but Twitter’s new terms may kill it dead: One of the new rules is that pictures shared on Twitter must be displayed alongside the original tweet.

Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, worries that “I can’t just display a tweet as a link and blockquote when I want to quote it.” I think he’s wrong, though, because Twitter can’t revoke a person’s writing privileges — God, not yet — for misuse of their content, since embedding a tweet doesn’t require an API key.

The rules also forbid intermingling tweets with non-Twitter content, “e.g. comments, updates from other networks.” That immediately raised concerns that Storify — a favorite tool of journalists — would bite the dust.

Twitter, mess with @storify and we are going to have problems.

— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) August 16, 2012

Twitter’s Ryan Sarver said Storify would be safe. (“They are what we *want* in the ecosystem,” he tweeted.)

Even if your organization doesn’t build apps, there may be changes to services journalists use. On Twitter, Dan Cohen told me: “We often find stories for Digital Humanities Now (@dhnow) using some Twitter processing services (like News.me, TweetedTimes)…we’re trying to figure out how those services will be affected, esp. since Flipboard seems to be on the ‘Dead to Twitter’ list.”

For example, the resurrected Digg.com displays tweets on its home page underneath popular stories. The reply/retweet/favorite buttons do appear when you hover over the tweet, but not until then. Does that break with the display guidelines? Bananastand Inc., the Betaworks company that now runs the site, did not want to comment for this story.

Our own Fuego, which monitors a universe of about 7,000 journalists to determine what they’re talking about in real time, will probably have to change. We display the screen name, avatar, and text of the first tweet associated with a popular link. Under Twitter’s rules, we’ll have to comply with Twitter’s Display Guidelines or risk losing our privileges.

The Nieman Lab’s iPhone app, like those of a lot of other outlets, displays a simple view of our Twitter feed. We think that’s okay, because it’s powered by RSS and not the API, but we’ll see.

It seems like a long time ago that journalists were debating the merits of Twitter. Now, Twitter is so integral to our work that it feels like a utility — electricity, the phone, Gchat — and less like what it is: a for-profit company trying to protect its business interests. Everything is subject to change. Worth remembering when you’re deciding where to invest your development efforts.