Updates to the Twitter developer platform
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
When they restricted access to their APIs and began tightening the screws to discourage third-party client development, Twitter began to stagnate because they no longer had a steady flow of new ideas to exploit. It also prevented third parties from providing the kind of user experience improvements and specializations that heavy users with large audiences relied on to make Twitter manageable. Without these things, the platform has deteriorated badly.
It isn’t surprising that they have circled back around to where they started and realized that they need third-party developers, but given how poorly they have treated the very people who drove Twitter’s initial success, I can’t imagine anybody is foolish enough to give them a second chance.
I think if they make a meaningful effort to engage, there will be plenty of developers ready to meet them there.
As a cry to stop this tyranny things like "app.net" were proposed. Then few years after that mastodon and a bunch of others which are not around anymore.
When I was using Twitter the most, I finally installed the official app after using a few clients over the years. Now when I use Twitter it is only to broadcast tweet and I just use Firefox on Android using the official mobile site.
After messing with Twitter in a number of different ways over the years I decided it isn't worth it. There are a graveyard of open source clients which talk to twitter over api v1 in all languages.
Also did you hear they can just ban presidents?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/08/tech/trump-twitter-ban/index....
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
In any event, they can ban anyone at any time. Their platform is private property, for better or worse.
I'm saying mastadon isn't my first try to help people leave the censored platforms. I'm currently building a couple myself!
They've been pretty ok towards e.g. making your CSR tool interface with twitter to answer support requests over Twitter.
This doesn't really strike me as a change in direction, though it does look easier for people in the second category to get started.
There doesn't look to be.
I think it has been updated in the last few hours - they've added a link to a trello board created 4 hours ago, and I don't remember a [COMING SOON] replacement for home timeline being there previously. So maybe they're going to add more endpoints than currently exist, but it'll take a lot to not have people worried about another rug pull.
> Doubling down on developers
That would require Twitter to be down on developers in the first place, otherwise they're doubling nothing.
If anything, more like they're just late to the party supporting integrations.
Come stop by /r/Twitter one of these days for a whiff of sentiment surrounding the company. I'm not saying this to be surly, just echoing my observations over the years.
Somehow I've been blocked from accessing the V2 API. Whatever it was I filled in a while ago about my use case wasn't good enough, and there's no recourse or way to resubmit my application.
It's a shame it's so hard to mess around with APIs and services like this nowadays without a commercial reason.
(Can anyone at Twitter help?)
They get you in then like a toxic relationship they dump you then later they decide they love you again etc etc.
TW is the one who's borderline hostile to developers and businesses building on it.
https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
As an anecdote – I work for a large company with a popular consumer-facing service and we were interested in building some Twitter bots/integrations. We quickly ran into API roadblocks on their end, and when we contacted them to work out a solution we were only given a series of aggressive sales pitches and very expensive contracts to sign. Needless to say those conversations didn't go anywhere. They couldn't even comprehend the possibility that giving developers free access to build unique experiences for their users could actually be a net positive for them.
I totally agree that Twitter trying to monetize their API was a bad idea though.
Here's my harebrained proposal: 1. Developers form an online-only cardcheck union. As a condition of joining you promise not to develop on APIs of businesses that don't have a contract with the union. 2. Union negotiates contracts with companies where they agree to support API versions for X years 3. Strike on all others
Building in someone else's garden is usually not without risk. I'd be wary, especially with a company that waffles on the issue as much as Twitter does.
What's to say they don't shutter access again just as soon as they get the growth metrics they want?
Building on Twitter's platforms is dangerous because a single leadership change could mean you're dead in the water. It has happened before, it'll likely happen again.
Bingo.
Of the two, Facebook has added functionality over the years that does quite well (groups supplant lazy entrenched competitors like forums and reddit, marketplace supplants lazy entrenched competitors like eBay and craigslist), while Twitter has... aligned themselves politically? Hired a bunch of bad ideas from Facebook to market themselves to celebrities (pre-censored posts)?
Speaking of aligning themselves politically, look at point #1 in their list of intended uses for the new API:
> Improve the health and safety of the public conversation
Looking to recruit free censors seems high on the list of needs / wants. The highest, as a matter of fact!
B-b-but -- Bluesky.
(please don't hold your breath while a protocol simply materializes. If this were a strategy Twitter cared about they would have made this move 10+ years ago when OpenMicroBlogging and OStatus were being kicked around).
I hope that this will help make Nitter.net more useful. It was constantly running into throttling issues, and it's unfortunately the best way to get access to valuable information that people, companies and government institutions lock behind the walls of Twitter's proprietary platform. The official web site has so many abusive patterns and is intentionally made unusable if you don't have an account (e.g. can't open images).
Does anyone else experience this penalty?
It's hard to distinguish whether this penalty is a result of my tweet's content, or a blanket penalty that assumes all programmatic tweets are spam.
Twitter's "conversationId" and trying to reconstruct "threads" is horrendous though. I wish there were an easier way to do it but you end up have to paginating and rebuilding the conversation by hand, terrible.
What is Twitter doing to regain my trust?
As far as I see there's no bookmarks in the V2 api which is disappointing.