{"id":4181,"date":"2023-01-28T13:15:04","date_gmt":"2023-01-28T21:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/?p=4181"},"modified":"2023-01-29T11:56:06","modified_gmt":"2023-01-29T19:56:06","slug":"looking-back-on-the-twitter-api","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/28\/looking-back-on-the-twitter-api\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking Back On the Twitter API"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>For all practical purposes, the Twitter API is dead. Technically, the API appears to be available for applications that don&#8217;t compete with Twitter&#8217;s main service, but it can no longer be used by 3rd party applications that work as Twitter clients. This includes some of the most popular Twitter applications like <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Twitterrific\/status\/1616183984098283520?s=20&amp;t=yMkbTWV2sV5wUcuBpMj98Q\" target=\"_blank\">Twitterific<\/a> and <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/tapbots\/status\/1616504262971822106?s=20&amp;t=K4DsZIvNu7VT60LTNA0l5A\" target=\"_blank\">Tweetbot.<\/a> Here are the announcements from those two applications about the end of their service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Say Goodbye to Tweetbot.<br><br>We&#8217;ve been proud to serve you over the last 12+ years, but due to circumstances beyond our control, we have to shut down Tweetbot.<br><br>Thank you so much for your patience and outpouring of support over these tough times at Tapbots. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/PjHePIkCpb\">https:\/\/t.co\/PjHePIkCpb<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/e45XXU7ugF\">pic.twitter.com\/e45XXU7ugF<\/a><\/p>\u2014 Tapbots (@tapbots) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/tapbots\/status\/1616504262971822106?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 20, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote> <script async=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Today marks the end of an era. Sadly, we&#8217;ve been forced to pull Twitterrific from both the iOS and Mac App Stores.<br><br>Twitter\u2019s unexplained revocation of our API access has left the app with no path forward. Please read our blog for more information???? <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/UZSdmqZtMD\">https:\/\/t.co\/UZSdmqZtMD<\/a><\/p>\u2014 Twitterrific (@Twitterrific) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Twitterrific\/status\/1616183984098283520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 19, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote> <script async=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p>This really is the end of an era. The Twitter API was <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.twitter.com\/official\/en_us\/a\/2006\/introducing-the-twitter-api.html\" target=\"_blank\">introduced on September 20, 2006<\/a>. This was the tweet where Twitter made it official that the Twitter API could no longer be used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working.<\/p>\u2014 Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TwitterDev\/status\/1615405842735714304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 17, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote> <script async=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p>If you do the math, the Twitter API was available for building alternatives to the official Twitter web site &amp; mobile app <strong><em>for over 16 years<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All of this was <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.techmeme.com\/230114\/p12#a230114p12\" target=\"_blank\">very well covered last week<\/a> and I&#8217;m not going to repeat it here, but I want to share some parts of an interview with Biz Stone from a 2007 Read\/WriteTalk podcast. That podcast appears to no longer accessible, but I found it on <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20070911051647\/http:\/\/readwritetalk.com\/2007\/09\/05\/biz-stone-co-founder-twitter\/#\">Wayback Machine<\/a>. It&#8217;s very clear from that interview how important the Twitter API was to the growth and success of Twitter in those early days. At the time of that interview, the Twitter API had ten times the traffic of the Twitter.com web site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The fact that Twitter started out as an open platform was widely celebrated and most long-time users of Twitter would say this is what attracted them to the service in those early days. Much of what you see today on Twitter&#8217;s main site and mobile application today was built on the backs of those early developers who leveraged the Twitter API and it really was a disservice to them to abruptly cut off access to the API earlier this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here are the parts of the 2007 Read\/WriteTalk interview that relate to the API&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><strong>Sean Ammirati:<\/strong>&nbsp;That\u2019s very interesting. Kind of taking a slight twist off of that, you mentioned that a couple of times you referred to Twitter as an open platform. I\u2019m curious how much you think that\u2019s been a critical attribute to your success. Just the fact that kind of anybody can come up and interact with the web services. I use it through an app called Twitterrific which I don\u2019t think is even your application.<\/em><br><em><br><strong>Biz Stone:<\/strong>&nbsp;Did you say Twitterrific?<\/em><br><em><br><strong>Sean Ammirati:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah.<\/em><br><em><br><strong>Biz Stone:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah. The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we\u2019ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas, and build things like Twitterrific, which is just a beautiful elegant way to use Twitter that we wouldn\u2019t have been able to get to, being a very small team. So, the API which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us. We\u2019ve seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com which shows an animated map of the world and what everyone\u2019s doing around the world with Twitter. Twitter is popping up from Spain and Japan and United States.And that\u2019s very, sort of like, \u201cLook at that!\u201d It\u2019s like staring at a fish bowl or something \u2013 an aquarium. You just find yourself getting lost in it. The API has really been a big success for us, and it\u2019s something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on, looking forward.<\/em><br><em><br><strong>Sean Ammirati:<\/strong>&nbsp;Cool. One of the things that\u2019s interesting \u2014 and I think I know what your answer here is going to be&nbsp;\u2013 but I feel compelled to ask anyway. With this sort of open API being such a critical part of your success, how does that affect the business model as that develops?<\/em><br><em><br><strong>Biz Stone:<\/strong>&nbsp;Well, it depends on what business model we decide to pursue. We\u2019re still very much weighing our options there, but there are definitely leading contender business models that we have mapped out where the API plays a significant role in generating just more traffic to our system. It puts us in an enviable position. So, the API becomes not only crucial for us on a creativity level and something that we can offer to the developers so that they can build their own applications and experiences, but it also becomes a way for us to grow and a way for us to potentially &#8211; depending on what business model we choose &#8211; do well there, business-wise. No matter what, we\u2019re going to be considering the API. We\u2019re going to be considering what folks are doing with it going forward so that it becomes part of what we are and what we do.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For all practical purposes, the Twitter API is dead. Technically, the API appears to be available for applications that don&#8217;t compete with Twitter&#8217;s main service, but it can no longer be used by 3rd party applications that work as Twitter clients. This includes some of the most popular Twitter applications like Twitterific and Tweetbot. Here [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4183,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,151,37],"tags":[93],"class_list":["post-4181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-news","category-thoughts-on","category-twitter","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4181"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4189,"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181\/revisions\/4189"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdoeff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}