New Twitter API Drops Support for RSS, Puts Limits on Third-Party Clients | Hacker News Reader

New Twitter API Drops Support for RSS, Puts Limits on Third-Party Clients

mashable.com

67 pointsmmahemoff22 comments

Edit: I stand corrected. Apparently, a lot of people do use RSS twitter for various reasons. Presumably the resyndication clause is targeted to prevent people re-creating RSS feeds that they are using from the API, though I have no idea why.

I'm not one of the RSS doom-predictors, as I find it very useful to keep up to date with blogs/etc that don't update very often and aren't enough on my radar to check frequently. Saying that, who on earth was using RSS to keep track of twitter? I can't imagine it was at all efficient, or easier than the API.

The other change that seems to be listed here:

> “Don’t resyndicate data. If your service consumes Twitter data, don’t take that data and expose it via an API, post it to other cloud services, and so on.”

has several possible conclusions listed, which I don't think are warranted. This looks like it's to squash any possibility of people getting around the user client limit by aggregating updates, before it happens. That said, vague hand waving seems to have been a large part of a lot of the recent twitter announcements.

> who on earth was using RSS to keep track of twitter?

I follow my own account via rss to review tweets later and see if any connected app is getting spammy (or whether I have been tweeting drunk) and a few others where I don't want to miss anything.

It would be very strange indeed if someone had added a gaggle of Twitter RSS feeds to their daily Google Reader consumption.

But RSS is as much a tool for developers to syndicate content as it is for end-users their subscriptions. It's an open standard that thousands of libraries and services know how to hook into.

e.g. Even if Yahoo! Pipes or IFTTT didn't know anything about Twitter's API, you could still mash it up using RSS. Or if you're trying to write a client to stream Twitter in a language where there's no Twitter library, you can resort to a generic RSS library.

I (and a few others I know) actually have a few Twitter feeds in Google Reader. It only takes a second to skim through them, and the ability to only see unread items is nice. No Twitter client that I've tried has done that, so RSS clients were the next best thing. Ah well.

SimplyTweet for iOS has support for fetching as many tweets as possible.

Disclaimer: I built it.

Interesting. I've used it, but only for rarely updated accounts like web host status updates.

I did that for a couple of slow-news-announcement twitter handles

I have 3 Twitter RSS feeds in Google Reader. They are the only Twitter feeds I currently care about, and I'd rather see them with my other feeds than in some other website with a shitty UI.

Google Reader also says the most popular Twitter RSS feed I have (~2 million followers) also has about 3000 other Google Reader subscribers. So we're probably talking about at least tens of thousands of people who do the same as me, if not more.

I must be pretty strange . . . along with half the people I know.

We follow a lot of twitter accounts (celebs, bloggers) in GReader or NewsBlur to keep our twitter feeds focused on real-life friends.

Me.

If you follow a user on twitter, you will NOT see his/her "directed" tweets (@someone) unless you directly visit their account. By following the RSS feed I have a way to follow ALL of someone's updates without having to do that manually with the browser.

"Saying that, who on earth was using RSS to keep track of twitter?"

You're not serious right? There's a lot of blog type sites without rss feeds than do have twitter feeds. Edge.org used to be like this.

Limiting third-party clients is kind of okay.

But dropping RSS? Really? In what universe does that even make sense?

I would be shocked if any significant number of people actually used the RSS feed for anything. I, for one, don't want an entry in my feed reader consisting of a stream of one-line messages. Seems utterly pointless.

The RSS feeds are an awesome feature if you want to follow high-volume, public feeds without cluttering up your twitter feed itself.

I follow several dozen close friends, and like to keep my twitter client free of noise from anyone else so I can get real-time info about what my people are up to. Thus, I follow about another 20 celebrities, bloggers, &c. in my RSS reader where time-criticality isn't an issue.

If they remove RSS feeds, there will be a screen-scraper in my futre, I fear. :(

Even though the slow leak of these stories in the tech press is not good PR, Twitter has mind share, so it may not matter. Celebrities, journalists, and typical tweetoholics probably don't care.

I agree with you, until their clients start to break.

Stats have shown that the vast majority of people use the web interface, the mobile web interface, and Twitter's own clients (in that order). After that comes third-party clients in a small slice of the pie.

Also, non-end-user clients (e.g. Hootsuite) won't get shut out because they provide value above and beyond 'list of tweets', and Tweetdeck is owned by Twitter now so they're going to be fine too.

Twitter could turn off all third-party clients tomorrow and the vast majority of Twitter users wouldn't notice anything (until the minority started complaining loudly). Even then, most people would probably think 'Well, just use one that works then.'

I think most of the heavy users/contributors probably use a client.

But they're still not providing user email address in authentication response. Don't understand that approach.

this is why I always sign in with twitter over facebook. No spam

In short, App.net has been given another gift.

Fuck.

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