We got hit by a wave of deprecation on Twitter yesterday | Hacker News Reader

We got hit by a wave of deprecation on Twitter yesterday

threads2.scripting.com

17 pointsdavewiner13 comments

So you're crying foul because something marked as deprecated for quite some time was taken offline? That's completely and entirely your own fault. Twitter has done nothing wrong actually.

Yesterday I found that twitter wasn't working for my simplified posting interface and example node.js application https://justtweet.herokuapp.com/ so I set out to fix it. The first thing I did was add logging of the error. When I tried pushing it back to Heroku I found that something else broke, because I didn't specify versions for my dependencies in my package.json and it got newer versions with a slightly different API. When I got it working I had refactored my code and changed the API url to https and to specify the version number as 1.1. Thanks to Dave's work note I found out why:

> "All non-versioned API endpoints, such as http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline, will cease functioning."

http://worknotes.scripting.com/october2012/101112ByDw/unbrea...

Mine was api.twitter.com without a version, not twitter.com.

https://github.com/resources/justtweet.herokuapp.com/commit/...

I see why they felt the need to break twitter.com to simplify their deployment but I don't see why they thought it made sense to break api.twitter.com urls without a version number.

It isn't just deployment. Every version requires extra code paths for developers to maintain.

I didn't mean to say that it would be effortless. What I'm saying is that having the API on twitter.com can complicate twitter's web app, which should ideally be a separate service from their API. That might be a change worth making, even if it caused problems for some API users. I don't think keeping a non-versioned url at api.twitter.com would complicate things enough to justify turning it off, unless they didn't care about small API users.

Me too. Was just emailed by a client complaining that their Twitter feed had gone down. I was using the JSON API too but needed to change from http://twitter.com/... to http://api.twitter.com/1/...

Dave, I really like RSS. I signed up to play with early functionality for radio2 when you let folk do that, and I agree with everything you're saying about twitter.

Why aren't you trying to replace it with the very decentralized thing you wish for? The various tools you're creating are either clients for the existing social networks, or aggregators/combiners/distributors -- none of which make us (or you, actually) any less reliant on Twitter. The fact that you're as vulnerable to Twitter's whims -- you, who's enmeshed in this world and understands more about it than I'll ever hope to, and has created formats to allow us to work apart from silos -- means I have no chance.

Is there something I'm not getting?

Of course we're trying to replace it.

My feed is out there for anyone to follow.

http://links.scripting.com/rss.xml

What else can I do? The press doesn't want to write about this, presumably because I'm not going to pay any money to sponsor their conferences.

I just don't have the power to get everyone to provide feeds, if I did, I would.

Did they completely fail to notice the API was still in use, or just not care? Thou shalt not break working code.

The now-deprecated API probably wasn't working for Twitter, so they got rid of it. Developers were warned before this happened, and your code is your responsibility, not Twitter's.

We're still talking about the folks who just kneecapped the popular third-party Twitter clients, right?

i could be wrong, but deprecation != removal (which is what this sounds like)

It sounds like they had been previously deprecated. Which implies eventual removal. The guy even says: "I admit I wasn't paying attention to their deprecation".

Better than a wave of defecation...

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