Arik Fraimovich, one of the developers behind Twitter tool Topify, announced in a blog post he will be shutting down the free service on August 5.  Topify enabled users to manage their Twitter accounts from their inboxes, rather than having to receive the rather clunky default notification emails.

The service  leveraged the X-Twitter* headers  that were in the messages sent out by the social network to identify and process the emails, but with a recent update Twitter removed them.  Nevertheless, Topify would be able to continue its services switching to the Site Streams  beta API, but Fraimovich explained that’s not why he’s pulling the plug on his popular email tool.

The main reason behind the Topify shutdown isn’t the technical change [Twitter] did, but the lack of communication before and after they did it and feeling that they don’t care about the smaller developers.”

Twitter seems to have quite a history of standing up its own developer community. One example from last year is when it blocked rivaling services that run ads in its stream shortly after it launched its own advertising system.

Some developers have taken a serious hit by Twitter’s out-of-the-blue policy changes, but the social network’s ecosystem is still going strong.  So much so, Twitter just confirmed in a blog post it received “significant”  funding from Russian VC firm Digital Sky Technologies, which owns a sizable chunk of Facebook, along with existing investors. The company did not disclose exactly how much money it raised.

Twitter is doing a pretty good job at maintaining its growth momentum, but it may soon see Google+ biting into its userbase.  Some analysts believe the latter may pose a competition to Twitter rather than Facebook alone, due to a data marketplace sources say Google is developing.  Privacy is also a consideration, which is something Google has been putting a lot of effort into, considering the issues its two biggest competitors have encountered in the past.