A new and improved Twitter API

This is what they cite as the key benefits:<p>&quot;A cleaner API that&#x27;s easier to use, with new developer features like the ability to specify which fields get returned, or retrieve more Tweets from a conversation within the same response<p>Some of the most requested features that were missing from the API, including conversation threading, poll results in Tweets, pinned Tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language &quot;<p>I really doubt this is what developers have been yearning for in a revamped Twitter API. Previous APIs provided plenty of functionality, it&#x27;s just that too many of us were burned by the ever-shifting policies around API use. I personally went from envisioning Twitter as the social data pipeline of the web to vowing never to touch it again within the span of one year. I can&#x27;t believe this announcement wouldn&#x27;t touch on policy and developer relations at all.

No word on the most important thing: the limits.<p>Current limits that keep becoming stricter and stricter make the API unusable.

An interesting side effect of making your product ad-driven is what it does to the incentive structure of treating your product as a platform.<p>Twitter is just one example of many of companies who have created an API, asked developers to build on it, and then later burned the whole thing down.<p>Fundamentally, if you let developers build products that access your data in ways that users want, the very first they&#x27;re going to do is <i>remove the fucking ads</i>. And, obviously, if that&#x27;s how your company makes money, you can&#x27;t let that happen. Given the choice between killing your ads or killing your API, you&#x27;re going to kill the API every time.<p>Imagine running a casino and offering a &quot;slot machine API&quot;. If you let the developers discard all of the losing spins, you&#x27;re gonna have a bad time. This is essentially what an ad-driven company does when they have an API that lets developers separate the data users want (actual data) from the data they don&#x27;t (ads).

I&#x27;d love access to the Twitter API for research purposes for my writing, but I&#x27;m priced out for that purpose.<p>I can&#x27;t prove it, but it feels like they only want big businesses researching their markets, and not people like me asking questions about Twitter itself - even though letting people do that would result in negligible additional traffic.<p>This might be controversial and I know people will say that they&#x27;re a private company and can do what they want, but Twitter has positioned itself as society&#x27;s de-facto official communication channel and I think the data on it should be a matter of public record at this point.<p>edit: Does anyone have experience with scraping tools and Twitter? Presumably it&#x27;s hard to do.

I ran a Twitter app for 9 years that they crippled, crippled, then eventually killed with policies. It went from “@ev loves your app,” to “your app is against our terms of service” in that time. My Twitter days are done.

These folks from Twitter might suffer from a major disconnection from reality, they burned several bridges of trust over the years and now they just write a small disclaimer about them discovering the hack from this week and the new API apparently does not address issues people had with it in the past (that were used to choke 3rd-party apps). Kudos to the developers working on it directly though, I suppose it takes a lot of effort and the managers responsibilities are not yours to take home but they need to actually regain trust before anything else, no matter how fancy the API is. Some kind of &quot;LTS&quot; or long term contract for the API versions would be a start.

Like to think I&#x27;m quite positive when it comes to companies putting things out there, but still can&#x27;t bring myself to trust Twitter&#x27;s actions when it comes to their API.<p>I built and sold (albeit for a very tiny sum of money) one of those text-extender mini-blog tools back in the day off the back of the API. It felt easy, clean and part of the ecosystem.<p>Every action they took degraded that trust. I know they&#x27;re a business and the data (and primarily their advertising serving and monitoring tech) is their lifeblood, but... fool me once...

One amazing use of the twitter API is to be able to mass delete your favs, rts, and tweets. It&#x27;s the only thing I use it for as the API and platform as a whole is otherwise hostile.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;MikeMcQuaid&#x2F;TwitterDelete" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;MikeMcQuaid&#x2F;TwitterDelete</a>

The final straw for me was when twitter deprecated the years-old auth keys I had used without any issues because I wouldn&#x27;t register my phone number.<p>If you look at twitter&#x27;s checkered history, I don&#x27;t see why anyone would put the effort into a new API without strict guarantees of future usability.

Spoiler: It doesn&#x27;t mention the word &quot;client&quot; at all. This is not going to bring back the features they took away in 2018.

&gt; given the security incident we discovered yesterday<p>We discovered. Heh.

Nobody wants a new API. The new features don’t make up for all the work needed to rewrite every call. Again. Nobody wants this.

They are pushing stuff on the public API that has been available for years to “managed accounts” via Gnip.com.<p>This makes the paid APIs more widely available - it’s now possible to start using paid APIs without talking to a sales person, with lower budget (but not lower prices - some endpoints cost nearly $1 per call).<p>They also plan to remove free endpoints 6 months to 1 year after a paid equivalent is released.<p>Bye bye per-user quota.

Here&#x27;s there actual roadmap: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trello.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;myf7rKwV&#x2F;twitter-developer-platform-roadmap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trello.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;myf7rKwV&#x2F;twitter-developer-platform-roa...</a>

I&#x27;d care more if I could actually appeal my dev account being perma banned for real reason other than I failed to clearly express what I wanted to do with a app<p>&gt; <i>You cannot create additional apps because your developer account was rejected or suspended.</i>

&quot;The number of active real users and followers on Twitter has been greatly exaggerated...&quot; - Inactive Twitter Users.<p>Bots and verified users have ruined the platform.

Nothing to see here. This isn&#x27;t an announcement, it&#x27;s a pre-announcement. Empty PR, &quot;We actually love developers (despite our sordid history), yadda yadda&quot;. Almost all of the details are TBD.

Did anyone look at the prices?? Holy shit. Are they selling gold? Those prices are ridiculous.

&gt; Eventually, the new API will fully replace the v1.1 standard, premium, and enterprise APIs.<p>Uh oh. Using nitter&#x27;s [1] RSS feeds is one of my main ways to access news. I have the feeling this is about to end.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;</a>

I hope they allow for blocking more than one user at a time at a minimum. Between the rate limit and only blocking one at a time, it takes forever to block a white supremacist and all their scumbag followers via the API. Much faster to just change your country to Germany.

Knowing Twitter I imagine &quot;improved&quot; means more closed and with stricter rate limits.

I always read comments about how Twitter is not profitable. Any ideas as to how much of their revenue comes from ads vs. businesses paying for API usage?

I get it, but anything with the phrase &quot;new and improved&quot; always strikes a nerve with me. In all honesty I hope other companies learn from this, and put in the effort to bolster their defenses-in-depth, especially at a CSE-level. I have witnessed many a times, how much power they are given, and how easily it could be exploited by just a bit of coercion.

Notice the page never seems to mention 3rd party clients, the only thing many of us care about.

Keeping my fingers crossed for removal of OAuth and other complications accessing the API. I hate using libraries for this, all I want is a simple token-based REST API, something like Facebook and many others have had for years.

Things I would like: * Date when you followed someone * Bookmarks api.<p>Doesn&#x27;t seems to be it.

Lots of (seemingly justified) complaints here. Is anybody on Mastadon? I have joined, but I have no followers and don&#x27;t know who to follow. I&#x27;d love some connections over there.<p>I&#x27;m @PintSizePorcupine@mstdn.social

All these years and they still don’t have a serious API offering.

Will they also switch from oauth1 to oauth2 with this?<p>(they already offer oauth2 for server to server, but as far as I know it&#x27;s still on oauth1 for user authentication)

Can something actually be both ‘new’ and ‘improved’?<p>Also, why does it sound like you’re trying to sell me a car?

Still no word on if they plan to make twitter bookmarks a part of the API. Disappointing

It doesn&#x27;t answer the most important question: is it OAuth2 now?

Public roadmap is always an interesting decision to make.

Twitter absolutely deserves the bad reputation they have here, and this does nothing to change it.

Why should anyone continue to use Twitter if it is unable to guarantee someone won&#x27;t hijack one or more of its accounts?<p>Let&#x27;s face it, those aren&#x27;t our accounts or our data. They are Twitter&#x27;s.<p>All of that is controlled by Twitter, and intended to serve their business interests, or whoever happens to be controlling Twitter at that moment.<p>It was just a few days ago someone else was controlling Twitter.