"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.
it is possible -- it unfortunately happens to be part of my job description to do so
one of the sibling comments basically has it right. you can build it from the bottom up (where "bottom" is the deepest tweet in the thread you know about, one way or another).
let me tell you though, i am _very_ excited for this new API, because there is some absolutely horrible code i will be able to delete as a result of it
My crusty old version of Tweetbot has been doing that for years...? Maybe not perfectly for tweets with hundreds of replies, but well enough.
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.
Current limits that keep becoming stricter and stricter make the API unusable.
It was about that time I just totally abandoned Twitter.
Use Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey. Fuck lock-ins. ActivyPub forever!
Other than that, indeed Mastodon and co. are great. :)
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/api-reference-index
Or is this the old documentation?
I read this blog post to determine a) what I need to do to port to the new API and b) how much this privilege of using Twitter will cost me, and it is mum on both of those aspects.
Absolutely brilliant, Twitter.
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).
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 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 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.
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.
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...
I had to use the archive initially to delete most of the old stuff but now I never have more than a few tweets to delete.
https://tom.eastman.nz/2020/06/what-it-took-to-delete-my-lik...
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.
We discovered. Heh.
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.
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.
> You cannot create additional apps because your developer account was rejected or suspended.
Bots and verified users have ruined the platform.
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.
That sounds absurd to me. 2500 requests is nothing and what if you're testing? The sandbox level is 50 requests for free.
Maybe I don't understand well the use cases but all the things that come to my mind for these APIs would required more than 2500 requests to do something interesting. They are pricing their data like if it was some sort of unique canonical truth vault when in reality 95% of it, it's just a bunch of shitposts.
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.
I guess they're quite used to breaking changes in twitter's API, then :) (presuming that a private API must change quite often)
I notice that there doesn't seems to be a distinction in the new API between user context and app context as far as rate limiting is concerned, so maybe that would make a difference.
But a lot of endpoints are still missing so everything is still to see!
Doesn't seems to be it.
I'm @PintSizePorcupine@mstdn.social
(they already offer oauth2 for server to server, but as far as I know it's still on oauth1 for user authentication)
Also, why does it sound like you’re trying to sell me a car?
Let's face it, those aren't our accounts or our data. They are Twitter's.
All of that is controlled by Twitter, and intended to serve their business interests, or whoever happens to be controlling Twitter at that moment.
It was just a few days ago someone else was controlling Twitter.
