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In the beginning there was nothing, or if there was something, it was restricted to private APIs negotiated through various companies (See the introduction of Google+ and its stellar APIs for an example or even Facebook before they opened it up to 3rd party apps). Then the hacker/maker culture kicked in, and everyone tried to offer up some kind of REST API for their one off web app. In this case the ability to integrate the social media apps made for some unique use cases and opened up a lot of opportunities for some awesome apps.
While this provided a form of nirvana for a couple of years, an interesting thing began to happen. The trend for open access slowly reversed. This started by throttling access, which was to be expected especially as a particular site grows in popularity and would need to throttle access to keep their infrastructure from falling down. The next stage would be adding additional restrictions to the certain kinds of apps being published akin to Twitter's de-emphasis on 3rd-party clients in lieu of their own client. Lastly, to "protect" the space, there's the additional requirement for paperwork in order to justify adding certain permissions, which makes sense to protect against malicious apps. Of course there's one site that's making an effort to be as open as possible at the expense of requiring a subscription (App.net), but they're also the only site that goes out of their way to ensure that the end user is the one who owns their data instead of the other freemium sites.
The question is, what happens to the independent developer who's writing a one-off app that they'd like to integrate with a given social media site? As it stands now, I can pretend to be a bigger player and go through the hoops to gain the API keys, and go through the approval processes to allow for things such as this blog to automatically post on my behalf once it is submitted, or I can just leave this to the big boys who are willing and able to pay to play in the space, and we can watch the current web become more gentrified and sanitized.
Of course the owners of these websites can do whatever they wish, and I am grateful that they are willing to open up access to 3rd parties. My biggest concern is that this is the future of all sites and apps that grow up and are expected to appease their investors and begin to turn a profit at the expense of the community they've built up.