Premium Account Activity API

>”Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message endpoints, originally slated for retirement on June 19th 2018, will be deprecated on Wednesday August 16, 2018 which provides 3 months from today’s release of the Account Activity API for migration.”

This is a huge “fuck you developers” from Twitter. They should have offered a year from the GA date to port applications. They should be sending emails to all applications using streaming APIs.

I like the webhook model, I think it’s great. I think the beta they had was effectively useless - for instance, the Docs were (still are?) entirely incorrect and basically told you completely wrong information with copy/paste errors everywhere. 0 QA. https://twittercommunity.com/t/account-activity-api-all-acti... you couldn’t register more than one webhook and were locked into a “env-beta” URL. Again, the Docs were wrong here.

I haven’t had a chance to review this since GA but I will now. I’m not hopeful that it’s any better given the track record of Twitter to deliver. If they did knock it out of the park I’ll be the first to praise them... but 3 months is still not enough time.

Twitter offered a base service that was great and they are now constantly removing features (no chronological timeline, no access to polls for 3rd party apps, now no streaming for 3rd party apps). A few days ago on HN we were talking about Mastodon but I don't see it replacing a Twitter as it's a platform, not a single entity that I can use.

The best scenario I can imagine would be to see the teams behind Twitterific and Tweetbot creating a Mastodon server and offering me to switch in the app in the coming months. Twitter is screwing us because we are, as users of those apps, the 1%. And I'm quite sure that the people I follow are also part of the same single percent.

To The Iconfactory and Tapbots: make me pay again, ask me to pay a subscription, I don't care. But screw Twitter, they treat you (and thus us) like garbage, make me switch to something offering me a better experience and that is guaranteed to last. Is posting tweets from my account through your apps still free? Then offer me the possibility to send tweets when I send messages on your new platform + a weekly message to send to my few followers that they should also switch.

Twitter is gonna apparently kill you at some point anyway, letting your users see a stream ordered by a shitty IA and with 1/3 of ads. So please, let's fight instead of slowly dying.

But if the price is high enough, couldn't a third party operating out of another part of the world undercut them using scraping, a dedicated team, and a clean API? Twitter may have technical remedies but it is unlikely they'd have legal ones outside of the US and a few Western countries.

Official APIs Vs. "pirate" APIs haven't really been a major issue until now because companies simply weren't charging enough to make the alternative cost effective. Is that going to change with pricing strategies like this one?

It's sad to see how Twitter is treating 3rd party devs, and "engaged" users — the kind of users willing to buy a 3rd party app to use their services. Furthermore, these engaged users bring their value to the platform by bringing in eyeballs from less engaged audiences rather than clicking on ads themselves.

I know I'm not getting my value.

Soon after Apple's acquisition they (1) jacked up the price, and then (2) shut it down soon after.

The reality is that Twitter doesn't have the resources allocated to manage tiny customers and doesn't desire to. That decision was made years ago. They can give an employee 10 customers to manage each of whom spend $36,000 a year and likely will increase and the math adds up.

Is anybody really shocked by this pricing?

On the same account, I have some very basic chatbot thingy where you can ask "where is train 1234?" and get a response. It works by listening to the User Stream, and using regex to check if the "bot" is being asked a question.

> When we announced our plans to retire and replace Site Streams, User Streams, and our REST Direct Message endpoints, we did so as part of our efforts to improve the developer experience and provide a sustainable way to help businesses engage with those looking to connect with them.

Streams were pretty suitable for my use-case, so I don't believe Twitter on this sentence.

Their changes seem like they just want a way to get non-firehose users to pay for accessing data streams, and might alienate some developers. Someone else mentioned the short timeline over which to migrate (for devs that only get access from today).

Dear Twitter, you've had a bad run with alienating developers in the past; please decide what you want to do. If we build our communities around your platform, be more clear about what we have to now pay for.

It's almost like the ad-free experience people want on social networks would be possible with this. I'm hoping they work with Tweetbot and this isn't a passive aggressive way to shut it down.