"A cleaner API that's easier to use, with new developer features like the ability to specify which fields get returned, or retrieve more Tweets from a conversation within the same response
Some of the most requested features that were missing from the API, including conversation threading, poll results in Tweets, pinned Tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language "
I really doubt this is what developers have been yearning for in a revamped Twitter API. Previous APIs provided plenty of functionality, it's just that too many of us were burned by the ever-shifting policies around API use. I personally went from envisioning Twitter as the social data pipeline of the web to vowing never to touch it again within the span of one year. I can't believe this announcement wouldn't touch on policy and developer relations at all.
Actually, this was a major point of API failure when I last tried to use it. Did you know that, with the current API, there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet? This makes it impossible to build tools that, say, allow you to visualize a tweet thread, because you simply can't fetch the thread.
So I'll say that, as a casual, social, and informational user of Twitter (i.e. not business, not adtech, not academia), this announcement gives me a little hope that we might see a resurgence in 3rd party apps that provide more powerful ways of interfacing with Twitter. At least, that's my hope, maybe I'm naive that they'd really allow this.
Speak for yourself. Their current API makes third party clients very difficult because they lack features and I hoped they'll announce something like this.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind them touching on the developers relations they want to build, but no company of their size will admit to wrongdoing in the past.
Also words aren't worth anything unless they come in a legally binding contract that can't change on a whim.
Most importantly none of these items, except maybe threads require a new API. Poll results would just be added to responses, pinned tweets would be a new flag to the search endpoint and a more powerful filtering and search language can just replace the search API. It seems weird that they are tearing it all down and forcing everyone to migrate.
if they reintroduce user streams I'll be pleased, if they ease off the per-app user limit I'll be elated. it doesn't really mean anything if they promise such and such policies or initiatives otherwise we'd all be holding our breath for bluesky. what's important is what they actually end up doing, which I guess we'll find out next week
I was looking into doing something for my own use, and you can't even retrieve your own list of followers or blocked users in one go! You have to paginate it, each page is counted against the rate limit!
That's what killed off Falcon Pro. The author released a version of the APP with a secret way of putting in your own API keys and I used that for a bit. Then he released a new version, but couldn't just grant the old people access because it would quickly reach the rate limit.
It was about that time I just totally abandoned Twitter.
Use Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey. Fuck lock-ins. ActivyPub forever!
An interesting side effect of making your product ad-driven is what it does to the incentive structure of treating your product as a platform.
Twitter is just one example of many of companies who have created an API, asked developers to build on it, and then later burned the whole thing down.
Fundamentally, if you let developers build products that access your data in ways that users want, the very first they're going to do is remove the fucking ads. And, obviously, if that's how your company makes money, you can't let that happen. Given the choice between killing your ads or killing your API, you're going to kill the API every time.
Imagine running a casino and offering a "slot machine API". If you let the developers discard all of the losing spins, you're gonna have a bad time. This is essentially what an ad-driven company does when they have an API that lets developers separate the data users want (actual data) from the data they don't (ads).
Unless this is the idea. Never have worked with it before but my understanding (confirmed by many of the comments here) is that the current API is pretty difficult to work with. Rate limit the new API and allow less restrictive access through paid tiers.
Suddenly Twitter is no longer reliant solely on ad revenue and all of the stigmas associated with it in the current changing environment.
With this, they are no longer an ad company but a platform ala Google Maps/Stripe. Plenty of companies would be more than willing to pay for unrestricted access to Twitter for data analysis.
Ad revenue may take a hit but won’t disappear overnight
I'd love access to the Twitter API for research purposes for my writing, but I'm priced out for that purpose.
I can't prove it, but it feels like they only want big businesses researching their markets, and not people like me asking questions about Twitter itself - even though letting people do that would result in negligible additional traffic.
This might be controversial and I know people will say that they're a private company and can do what they want, but Twitter has positioned itself as society's de-facto official communication channel and I think the data on it should be a matter of public record at this point.
edit: Does anyone have experience with scraping tools and Twitter? Presumably it's hard to do.
I've been collecting Twitter scrapers recently with the idea that I might eventually do something with them. This one [1] seems most promising but I haven't actually tried it.
This is just my own vague experience, but I don't think this specific to Twitter, nor does it really have to do with pricing people out.
I think that public APIs in general are a thing of the past, mostly because of bad actors, security problems and scale. Look at things like Clearview AI, just slurping up every photo they can get their hands on. All it takes is one or two abusers and then everyone has to be limited.
The simple instagram API that I used to just get my own most recent post 3-4 times per day, now requires me to submit an application, with multiple size app icons, justification for my use, privacy policy, ToS, etc. All to I can fetch my most recent post from my own profile.
It's just ridiculous how every large website is clamping down on their APIs, but with abuse left and right, they don't really have many options.
I ran a Twitter app for 9 years that they crippled, crippled, then eventually killed with policies. It went from “@ev loves your app,” to “your app is against our terms of service” in that time. My Twitter days are done.
These folks from Twitter might suffer from a major disconnection from reality, they burned several bridges of trust over the years and now they just write a small disclaimer about them discovering the hack from this week and the new API apparently does not address issues people had with it in the past (that were used to choke 3rd-party apps). Kudos to the developers working on it directly though, I suppose it takes a lot of effort and the managers responsibilities are not yours to take home but they need to actually regain trust before anything else, no matter how fancy the API is. Some kind of "LTS" or long term contract for the API versions would be a start.
Exactly. What's their goal with the new API? Will they continue to be hostile to Twitter app developers?
Years ago, they made a distinct choice to become a business/celebrity platform, and actively moved away from the utility it could have been. That move cemented my view of Twitter as a dead-end for technology.
This disclaimer is hilarious, it's like some terrible catastrophe happened far far away from them. But in fact it's been days of deafening silence out of Twitter, and they are fricking ground zero!
Like to think I'm quite positive when it comes to companies putting things out there, but still can't bring myself to trust Twitter's actions when it comes to their API.
I built and sold (albeit for a very tiny sum of money) one of those text-extender mini-blog tools back in the day off the back of the API. It felt easy, clean and part of the ecosystem.
Every action they took degraded that trust. I know they're a business and the data (and primarily their advertising serving and monitoring tech) is their lifeblood, but... fool me once...
One amazing use of the twitter API is to be able to mass delete your favs, rts, and tweets. It's the only thing I use it for as the API and platform as a whole is otherwise hostile.
It is probably true nobody who currently codes against Twitter APIs wants new APIs. I've rewritten them before and won't be doing it again. Maybe someone new will come along to replace us. Twitter doesn't care unless it makes them more views.
Doesn't matter anyway because they already got rid of the useful APIs, which broke everything anyone I knew had written. Handwriting has been on the wall.
Sort of like boycotting Facebook, it's only takes the step of stopping to set you free.
As a user I would like for Twitterrific for example to support polls and pinned tweets. So at least one user of a third partly client wants this, I bet that there are more.
They are pushing stuff on the public API that has been available for years to “managed accounts” via Gnip.com.
This makes the paid APIs more widely available - it’s now possible to start using paid APIs without talking to a sales person, with lower budget (but not lower prices - some endpoints cost nearly $1 per call).
They also plan to remove free endpoints 6 months to 1 year after a paid equivalent is released.
I'd care more if I could actually appeal my dev account being perma banned for real reason other than I failed to clearly express what I wanted to do with a app
> You cannot create additional apps because your developer account was rejected or suspended.
Personally, I don't have an issue with bots on a platform, as long as they are there to be helpful. In the case of Twitter, I would restrict bots from being able to reply to tweets^, retweet, or like. Only output original things (like automated messaging) or restrict it to DMs. And possibly restrict the use of @s and #s in those tweets so they can't affect trending. That way you can seriously cut down the signal to noise ratio and also make it much easier to spot a bot account.
And please put a BOT label on every bot account and tweet they send. This should be a hard requirement.
^ However, this would interfere with bots like the threading or videothis types. So maybe not apply that restriction.
Nothing to see here. This isn't an announcement, it's a pre-announcement. Empty PR, "We actually love developers (despite our sordid history), yadda yadda". Almost all of the details are TBD.
I hope they allow for blocking more than one user at a time at a minimum. Between the rate limit and only blocking one at a time, it takes forever to block a white supremacist and all their scumbag followers via the API. Much faster to just change your country to Germany.
[+] [-] picodguyo|5 years ago|reply
"A cleaner API that's easier to use, with new developer features like the ability to specify which fields get returned, or retrieve more Tweets from a conversation within the same response
Some of the most requested features that were missing from the API, including conversation threading, poll results in Tweets, pinned Tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language "
I really doubt this is what developers have been yearning for in a revamped Twitter API. Previous APIs provided plenty of functionality, it's just that too many of us were burned by the ever-shifting policies around API use. I personally went from envisioning Twitter as the social data pipeline of the web to vowing never to touch it again within the span of one year. I can't believe this announcement wouldn't touch on policy and developer relations at all.
[+] [-] Nav_Panel|5 years ago|reply
Actually, this was a major point of API failure when I last tried to use it. Did you know that, with the current API, there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet? This makes it impossible to build tools that, say, allow you to visualize a tweet thread, because you simply can't fetch the thread.
So I'll say that, as a casual, social, and informational user of Twitter (i.e. not business, not adtech, not academia), this announcement gives me a little hope that we might see a resurgence in 3rd party apps that provide more powerful ways of interfacing with Twitter. At least, that's my hope, maybe I'm naive that they'd really allow this.
[+] [-] bad_user|5 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind them touching on the developers relations they want to build, but no company of their size will admit to wrongdoing in the past.
Also words aren't worth anything unless they come in a legally binding contract that can't change on a whim.
[+] [-] kevincox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raxxorrax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alicemaz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheesecracker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sim_card_map|5 years ago|reply
Current limits that keep becoming stricter and stricter make the API unusable.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|5 years ago|reply
It was about that time I just totally abandoned Twitter.
Use Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey. Fuck lock-ins. ActivyPub forever!
[+] [-] slightwinder|5 years ago|reply
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/api-reference-index
Or is this the old documentation?
[+] [-] vdfs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
Twitter is just one example of many of companies who have created an API, asked developers to build on it, and then later burned the whole thing down.
Fundamentally, if you let developers build products that access your data in ways that users want, the very first they're going to do is remove the fucking ads. And, obviously, if that's how your company makes money, you can't let that happen. Given the choice between killing your ads or killing your API, you're going to kill the API every time.
Imagine running a casino and offering a "slot machine API". If you let the developers discard all of the losing spins, you're gonna have a bad time. This is essentially what an ad-driven company does when they have an API that lets developers separate the data users want (actual data) from the data they don't (ads).
[+] [-] nabbe|5 years ago|reply
Suddenly Twitter is no longer reliant solely on ad revenue and all of the stigmas associated with it in the current changing environment.
With this, they are no longer an ad company but a platform ala Google Maps/Stripe. Plenty of companies would be more than willing to pay for unrestricted access to Twitter for data analysis.
Ad revenue may take a hit but won’t disappear overnight
[+] [-] benlumen|5 years ago|reply
I can't prove it, but it feels like they only want big businesses researching their markets, and not people like me asking questions about Twitter itself - even though letting people do that would result in negligible additional traffic.
This might be controversial and I know people will say that they're a private company and can do what they want, but Twitter has positioned itself as society's de-facto official communication channel and I think the data on it should be a matter of public record at this point.
edit: Does anyone have experience with scraping tools and Twitter? Presumably it's hard to do.
[+] [-] CrazyStat|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/bpb27/twitter_scraping
[+] [-] ehsankia|5 years ago|reply
I think that public APIs in general are a thing of the past, mostly because of bad actors, security problems and scale. Look at things like Clearview AI, just slurping up every photo they can get their hands on. All it takes is one or two abusers and then everyone has to be limited.
The simple instagram API that I used to just get my own most recent post 3-4 times per day, now requires me to submit an application, with multiple size app icons, justification for my use, privacy policy, ToS, etc. All to I can fetch my most recent post from my own profile.
It's just ridiculous how every large website is clamping down on their APIs, but with abuse left and right, they don't really have many options.
[+] [-] abootstrapper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iMuzz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caiobegotti|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benburleson|5 years ago|reply
Years ago, they made a distinct choice to become a business/celebrity platform, and actively moved away from the utility it could have been. That move cemented my view of Twitter as a dead-end for technology.
[+] [-] stefan_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wastedhours|5 years ago|reply
I built and sold (albeit for a very tiny sum of money) one of those text-extender mini-blog tools back in the day off the back of the API. It felt easy, clean and part of the ecosystem.
Every action they took degraded that trust. I know they're a business and the data (and primarily their advertising serving and monitoring tech) is their lifeblood, but... fool me once...
[+] [-] thinkingemote|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete
[+] [-] esnard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|5 years ago|reply
https://tom.eastman.nz/2020/06/what-it-took-to-delete-my-lik...
[+] [-] abc126589|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DickScarington|5 years ago|reply
If you look at twitter's checkered history, I don't see why anyone would put the effort into a new API without strict guarantees of future usability.
[+] [-] R0b0t1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixxel|5 years ago|reply
We discovered. Heh.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fluffernutter|5 years ago|reply
Doesn't matter anyway because they already got rid of the useful APIs, which broke everything anyone I knew had written. Handwriting has been on the wall.
Sort of like boycotting Facebook, it's only takes the step of stopping to set you free.
[+] [-] yoz-y|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdevonoes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fooyc|5 years ago|reply
This makes the paid APIs more widely available - it’s now possible to start using paid APIs without talking to a sales person, with lower budget (but not lower prices - some endpoints cost nearly $1 per call).
They also plan to remove free endpoints 6 months to 1 year after a paid equivalent is released.
Bye bye per-user quota.
[+] [-] Fiveplus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aranw|5 years ago|reply
> You cannot create additional apps because your developer account was rejected or suspended.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|5 years ago|reply
Bots and verified users have ruined the platform.
[+] [-] mroche|5 years ago|reply
And please put a BOT label on every bot account and tweet they send. This should be a hard requirement.
^ However, this would interfere with bots like the threading or videothis types. So maybe not apply that restriction.
[+] [-] _qulr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoisjuan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WaltPurvis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeJah9to|5 years ago|reply
Uh oh. Using nitter's [1] RSS feeds is one of my main ways to access news. I have the feeling this is about to end.
[1] https://nitter.net/
[+] [-] icehawk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FroshKiller|5 years ago|reply