Updates to the Twitter developer platform(blog.twitter.com)
blog.twitter.com
Updates to the Twitter developer platform
https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2021/build-whats-next-with-the-new-twitter-developer-platform
58 comments
Having been farmed for ideas and then kicked out once, I can't imagine who would sign up for round two.
Twitter started trashing its API 9 years ago. That's eons in developer time. This was before the first public release of React, for example.
I think if they make a meaningful effort to engage, there will be plenty of developers ready to meet them there.
I think if they make a meaningful effort to engage, there will be plenty of developers ready to meet them there.
Also given that there are now a whole new generation of developers who weren't around when the whole trashing began years ago.
Perhaps folks who never participated in Round One and therefore carry no scars.
As someone who has been using Twitter daily for almost 14 years now, I have witnessed what you are saying and can totally confirm it.
My historical perception of Twitter is that they were incredibly developer-hostile, to the point of almost being predatory (copy-ing 3rd party apps/integrations, then shutting said 3rd party apps out of the API...). This strikes me as similar to Google announcing a new Google Reader developer platform? However Somebody please tell me if my impression is outdated.
Twitter's hostility comes down to jealously defending their business model. They declared war on third party clients about a decade ago, and that hasn't really changed. You'll note the API available under the new, looser, rules does not include any equivalent of the home timeline endpoint, which would be pretty essential to the client use case. A third party client could do things like not show their embedded ads (promoted tweets), or display the timeline in a manner more useful to the user than to Twitter's engagement metrics, and Twitter don't like that.
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.
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.
By any chance do you know whether V2 has an endpoint for bookmarks?
The v2 docs are here: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/migrate/tw...
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.
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.
I had seen the api endpoints earlier and noticed that bookmarks were absent. But as I am not a professional user of this API, I wanted to see whether more knowledgeable people know anything I may have missed. Thanks for confirming it!
The bookmarks API is being worked on and is on the roadmap https://t.co/roadmap
what business model?
The Twitter platform was very open. This is why it grew like wild fire in tech circles. Then over time the Twitter company became predatory (claimed it wouldn't have it's own app, but then launch it's own), at first nobody cared because the v1 api was solid and anyone could make a client or a bot. Then over time they started going after clients and at one point said third party clients are outlawed (this was immediately retracted, but this didn't stop them from iterating in ways which broke clients).
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....
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....
Why shouldn't they be able to ban a president? They're not royalty.
In any event, they can ban anyone at any time. Their platform is private property, for better or worse.
In any event, they can ban anyone at any time. Their platform is private property, for better or worse.
Mastodon still exists, I like it and would recommend it.
Yup, a link to my mastodon instance is in my profile!
I'm saying mastadon isn't my first try to help people leave the censored platforms. I'm currently building a couple myself!
I'm saying mastadon isn't my first try to help people leave the censored platforms. I'm currently building a couple myself!
Not just mastadon, but the fediverse in general, which encompasses quite a diversity of software (pleroma, pixelfed, etc.) and has apparently now even started to threaten twitter enough to make it start initiatives to try and EEE it.
Maybe a case of too little, too late? Hard to win developers back after half a decade of being hostile to developers.
> 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.
> 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.
Twitter's just openly hostile to everyone now, not just developers.
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.
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.
I'm a verified Twitter user who runs a bunch of inconsequential bots (https://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks, https://twitter.com/urnowentering) and has a small side project for discovering what your friends are liking on Twitter.
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?)
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?)
Twitter treats its developers extremely poorly, probably because developing Twitter as a platform is not rewarded internally compared to copying Clubhouse or adding a Stories clone, even though the platform is the one of Twitter's unique strengths that can't be replicated by Facebook or Google.
Please consider not contributing to their network effect and not enabling their abusive behavior towards both developers and users with your content.
I'm kinda skeptical about developer platforms / SDK's for Twitter/facebook/LinkedIn whatever.
They get you in then like a toxic relationship they dump you then later they decide they love you again etc etc.
They get you in then like a toxic relationship they dump you then later they decide they love you again etc etc.
Honestly, as someone who worked on and off with both FB and TW APIs for ages now, FB developer (and business) API experience was actually superb (I know, I'm shocked as well).
TW is the one who's borderline hostile to developers and businesses building on it.
TW is the one who's borderline hostile to developers and businesses building on it.
I'll never touch Twitter's developer platform again.
Good. Can I suggest an exploration of the ActivityPub ecosystem?
https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
The single biggest reason Twitter stagnated as a platform (compared to, say, Facebook, who they were neck-to-neck with at the start) was their failure to realize the potential of their developer ecosystem. Twitter has always treated their APIs as a liability and an avenue to make a quick buck, which always was and still is a losing strategy. Even in this press release the first thing I see is pricing tiers, which is an immediate turn off.
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.
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.
The competitive advantage of a good API must wear of at some point because Facebook's API is borderline useless at this point.
I totally agree that Twitter trying to monetize their API was a bad idea though.
I totally agree that Twitter trying to monetize their API was a bad idea though.
Think of companies like Zynga who built multi-billion dollar businesses solely on the back of Facebook. Something like that has always been impossible with Twitter.
No. Even if developing something Twitter related was interesting to me, I wouldn’t want to be complicit in encouraging anyone to join or use Twitter.
Thank you.
At this point, building on someone else's API is a form of insanity.
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
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
Twitter clamped down on developers in the past by limiting or suspending access.
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 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?
Twitter doesn't really have a long term strategy. They tend to waffle from feature to feature and product to product depending on market pressure and where the winds are blowing today.
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.
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.
> Twitter doesn't really have a long term strategy.
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!
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!
> long term strategy.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus
The actual changes to the policy are removing the paragraph "You must contact us if you find that your service will require more than 1 million tokens. Services that require more than 1 million tokens may be subject to additional terms regarding Twitter API access." which for some reason was under the advertising section, and deleted the entire "Replicating the Twitter experience" section which you can find e.g. on https://web.archive.org/web/20211019001715/https://developer...
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).
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).
I've noticed that when I tweet via the API, those tweets receive less impressions vs the tweets that are posted via the web interface.
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.
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.
Build what’s next (so we can rip it off and monetise it)
It's nice to see the elevated access. 500k tweets was just too low and a non-starter for anything trying to pull discussions out of tweets.
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.
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.
I still don't understand their obsession to limiting 'likes/favorites' access to about 3200 tweets. AFAIK, a lot of people use these as bookmarks. And a lot of patterns can emerge from what people favorite. Restricting access to such metrics for developers is a self-goal especially if they are targeting ads for Twitter users
it's an abuse vector, and the rate limits are there to prevent abuse.
If we are talking of abuse vectors, they should similarly be limiting access to followers and tweets by hashtags. Those are at a higher risk of abuse. I can look up a hashtag or follower list and simply run a bot to selectively reply at those accounts. Rate limited as a bonus too. It is but poorly conceived if that is the reason.
They didn't build the API to deal with people using it in a useful way so instead of making it useful they use limits to guard against use or over use. As a result they also prevent abusers / attackers from causing denial of service (thus busting SLAs and waking up tired engineers).
Yeah, I'm going to let Twitter burn me again.......... nope
Yeah, a company I've worked got shafted big time by Twitter.
What is Twitter doing to regain my trust?
What is Twitter doing to regain my trust?
I'm curious about the full archive search but I have no idea where to look up rate limits. I've previously written a tool that turns "LRT" ("last retweet") in a tweet into an actual link the the poster's last retweet but they didn't work generally since you could only previously search the last 7 days of tweets. Also I wanted to make a viewer for long threads I wanted to read but that 7 day limit killed that project.
As far as I see there's no bookmarks in the V2 api which is disappointing.
As far as I see there's no bookmarks in the V2 api which is disappointing.
To me, Twitter never really was much of a product per se. It's mechanics are so simple that it seems more like an enormous append-only log. I suspect they'd be doing much better if they had an ecosystem of clients, most of which would be better than the Twitter app only because they couldn't be any lamer, and focused on the platform as a global messaging plane.
I hope v1.1 API won't get deprecated for a long time. I wrote a couple of cron jobs automating personal tasks awhile ago and I really don't want to touch that codebase anytime soon.
at the same time, they killed my bot :( People loved my bot.
Hell no. Twitter used to have a platform. Then they broke twitter. Hell absolute no. They would have to spin off as a new company with a small team and even then I'd be highly skeptical. Their feed is beyond worthless. I don't need that toxic of a firehose. Twitter needs a reimagining and it won't grow from the inside. They know this and they are scared. Same with Facebook. Nothing good grows in those walled gardens anymore. Gluck!
Ok, but please don't fulminate on HN. Maybe you don't owe $bigco better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.