Twitter early release v2 API conversation tree example | Hacker News Reader

Twitter early release v2 API conversation tree example

github.com

19 pointsjgeduldig12 comments

The thing that bugs me about Twitter is how locked down the API is. You can't do much with it before you have to start paying them (a lot).

In the early days of the Facebook API, I made a cool little MacOS screen saver / visualizer with its data (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZnB14BVjlE). I'd love to build some similar tech experiments with Twitter, but their API "Sandbox" allows only 250 API requests per month before you have to start paying them hundreds to thousands of dollars for just a few hundred more. https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing/search-30day

I feel this seriously limits what developers can do with Twitter. It's such a rich source of data that could be explored in so many interesting ways, but it's all locked away. It's not worth even building a cool little thing to share on Twitter as just showing it on the Internet anywhere will use up all the API requests immediately. Hurts potential innovations built off the platform.

Let's just be glad they still have an API. I think the days of brand name social media services providing any useful free API are numbered. They've already gotten the growth boost they wanted out of it, so now it's just an expensive liability.

I just killed a side project that would have depended on social network APIs because they all lose functionality with every release. The trend couldn't be clearer.

> I feel this seriously limits what developers can do with Twitter.

As much as I agree with you that it's a great shame the limits are so tight and fees so high, I think their API price model suggests some developers are doing things with the API - and paying Twitter for it.

Maybe not fun, interesting hacks, but something of value to someone.

Why should any developer even consider using the API again, given twitters past developer hostile behavior? Briefly scanning over the labs page doesn't add seem to address this?

Because they need it do something? It's not like if they don't Twitter they can go use something else that has similar content.

Can someone tell me why it’s so hard to extract bookmarked tweets off Twitter? I don’t know of any API or scraping option for getting thousands of bookmarks out of the platform. Those are the most useful tweets to me

How do you even bookmark a tweet nowadays? Does this feature still exist? Because I can’t find it.

Yes, this could be better. it's in the "..." menu in the Twitter website and iOS and Android apps, but not currently available in other apps.

I've used Twitter nearly every day for years, and the first I heard about bookmarks was on HN a while ago. I've always just used favs as a bookmark substitute.

They recently added it as a prominent menu item on the website, but it's still a complete mystery about how to create a bookmark (buried under share icon, which is semi-usable on desktop and completely awful on iOS).

We're working on the API for Bookmarks right now. Hoping we can ship this before too long. https://trello.com/c/qztXMWCK/76-bookmarks-v2-twitter-api

Thanks Andy! I know this will be useful for a lot of people

Thanks! That looks better than the hacks needed before.

Although I seriously wonder if I even should bother trying to get an API key again...

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