What's going on with the Twitter API?

[scripting]

I'm very confused by what Twitter is doing with their API. Concerned with how it might impact my apps, including Radio3 and Little Outliner.

For background, here's a report on an announcement by Twitter on Mac OS Rumors.

From over the weekend, @dariusk wrote up a bunch of suggestions for Twitter. They're more like desperate pleas for clemency.

What's going on at Twitter? Why do they care about squeezing money from app devs. Things are finally starting to go well for Twitter, and now they want to create controversy about their API of all things? I would think they would want to lay low after all the grief Facebook is dealing with now re their API.

If you have any info to share, esp statements from people at Twitter, please post a comment below.

[harm-github]

https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing

I'm not sure which API you use, but the basic interactions that don't involve access to the hose, or big collections of tweets, seem to not be related to this change.

[scripting]

Thanks for the link. I use very little of the API.

1. Mostly to handle identity. I get back a username from a validated call, and use that to store stuff locally (on my server) for the user. Basically the oAuth dance.

2. Post to Twitter at the user's command. Little Outliner has this. Put the cursor on a headline, click the tweet icon, it confirms, then posts the text of the headline to Twitter.

3. I can embed tweets in blog posts on Scripting News, that's a call to the embed API. You can see an example of that on yesterday's archive page. Click the gray wedge next to "I have a feature..." line to see the tweet.

I think that's about it.

[dariusk]

The good news is, Twitter just today updated their documentation (taking a lot of my advice!) and specifically updated their Site and User Streams Migration Guide.

@scripting, if what you do is oAuth, tweet-a-headline-and-link, and embedding, none of that should be affected by the new API changes, since none of those use the Streaming API. The real losers here are apps that need to real-time monitor a feed of Tweets... mostly 3rd-party Twitter clients. Which is terrible. I also have a few custom anti-harassment tools that need to monitor live feeds that I may have to retire or significantly modify. I'm going to do some testing over the next week now that the API is stable...

[manton]

I think @dariusk's summary here is fair. These changes don't affect all apps and probably won't break @scripting's apps. But the larger point is that Twitter is in the final phase of wrapping up what they started in 2012 with discouraging certain types of apps. I'd like to do everything I can to move away from Twitter and make alternate platforms more viable, based on the open web and indie blogs.

[scripting]

@manton -- I remember when they nuked the apps that emulate their clients. Of course. I don't see why there's any remaining angst over that. People believe what they want to believe (like they didn't really mean it, I guess).

Of course I believe something useful could be created outside Twitter using RSS. But people would have to work together to do that. So far everyone seems to be happy to work in their own space, and not reach out so much to peer with other developers.

The test of being open isn't whether you support open formats, although that enables stuff that wouldn't otherwise be possible, it's if you interop, and commit to continuing to interop. And even better, to expand what you interop on. :boom:

[dariusk]

I recommend looking at Mastodon, an open source and open standards based decentralized Twitter clone. Every user has an RSS feed for their own profile, just like Twitter used to. And there are real people and communities on it. And it has interop with any OStatus or ActiviyPub social network.

[scripting]

Of course I'm aware of Mastodon. We've wandered off topic. I'd like to stick with info about Twitter.