Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API | Hacker News Reader

Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API

dev.twitter.com

85 pointsdavewiner8 comments

The important part:

Additionally, if you are building a Twitter client application that is accessing the home timeline, account settings or direct messages API endpoints (typically used by traditional client applications) or are using our User Streams product, you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.

We will not be shutting down client applications that use those endpoints and are currently over those token limits. If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you'll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you'll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.

So Tweetbot et al will work until they have twice as many users as today. And then what? Surely Twitter won't give them permission to continue after that, given that the entire point of this update was to get rid of 3rd-party clients.

To be fair, they've made the restrictions pretty liberal for the long tail of applications. But this still rubs me the wrong way.

I actually use and love the official Twitter iPhone app. But I don't want to live in a world where 3rd-party apps, which often introduce and popularize new features, cease to exist.

And then what?

Best case scenario is: those client apps get in touch with Twitter and negotiate a per-user rate to be paid to Twitter.

This could be a great way for Twitter to allow third-party clients, but get a cut of the revenues from the non-free ones.

And it allows Twitter to decide this on a case-by-case basis.

(Or, maybe it's just a way to force very popular commercial clients into complying with whatever Twitter's revenue-generation plans end up being).

The most "creepy" part of this is the limitation in user tokens for an application. If you have more than 100.000 users that use your Twitter client, you have to talk with Twitter. For what? I don't know, but I imagine that it would be some kind of paying per use or maybe adding mandatory in-stream ads.

Seems like they're saying this: "If you plan on using the API like many people already use it, don't bother."

Also, what category would LinkedIn and Instagram's usage of the API fall under?

I would put Instagram on the consumer line between engagement and analytics and LinkedIn on the engagement line between between business and consumer. They four quadrants are fairly specific though and are not a good match for everything.

Well, at least they're giving us a long lead time until 1.1.

Really? 6 month from turning it on to disabling 1.0 is really not that long a time at all. In that time, every client needs to migrate to 1.1 and QA that, and then all the distribution channels (distros, app stores, etc.) all need to get updated versions, and then users all need to upgrade. 6 months is extremely optimistic for that to all happen.

But there's not much change. For most developers it will require no more changes than replacing "api.twitter.com/1" with "api.twitter.com/11" (or whatever it is) and testing a little bit for the new rate limits (which, as Twitter says, will be enough for apps that are currently within those limits).

The bigger problem is for apps than don't authenticate: Search apps, analytics... anything that does not write to Twitter is probably not authenticated. They'll have to migrate to OAuth and requiring user authorization.

But, as I said, this will not be the case for most of apps. Anyways, it wouldn't be bad that Twitter gave more margin to developers.

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