hauntedcastle.org

Regarding #newtwitterguidelines

A few days ago, a minor shitstorm erupted when twitter more or less announced that they didn’t want people using their API to build apps that competed with their own clients.  This is a reasonable direction for a company that’s become more consumer-focused than it was when the API was first released and they didn’t have any native clients of their own (save the website).  I would also imagine that twitter would surely allow things like echofon, tweetdeck, twitterific, etc. to continue operating as usual, considering those companies were hugely responsible for twitter’s growth onto various mobile and desktop platforms.

I’m a bit confused about how these decisions will impact the development of the Twitter API moving forward.  Basically, the Twitter API seems entirely built for developers looking to build their own twitter clients.  It’s very bad at doing the kind of things that would be considered “tools.”  A couple of examples:

  • You can’t fetch data very far in the past.  If you want to do any real data analysis, you have to build out your own service that will continuously fetch and cache calls from twitter, then make calls to that.
  • The endpoints and data returns are all in “timeline” format, which jives best with showing a bunch of stuff in a list.  I’ve been experimenting with a little app that will track how many times you’ve been retweeted each day.  It’s kind of impossible to get this pretty simple data, because you have to wade through a bunch of irrelevant status message data.  That’s just a long way of saying there’s not a lot of endpoints that return more targeted data.  Most endpoints are tailor made to return exactly the kind of data that would be useful building the kind of apps that they don’t want developers to build anymore.

So I’m of the impression that it’s twitter’s platform to do whatever they want with.  Things change, and the kind of things they want from developers now is different than the things they wanted in the past.  This is the nature of OPP (other people’s platforms), and the risk any developer takes going in.  

That said, I would love the result of this change to be an expanded set of API endpoints that allow developers more options to build out different kind of tools on top of Twitter’s platform.

  1. wcrtr posted this