Upcoming Twitter API Changes

I always called the Twitter API the ideal system for developers: a generous API, crafted with great documentation, just shook my imagination a few years ago. Twitter was then young, did not know how to retweet, the logical steps seemed to be the introduction of advertising trends, galleries with photos or its own abbreviation of links.

Today, Twitter introduced some of the upcoming changes in the new version of the API . Otherwise, as the crackdown is not called. Judge for yourself:

1. All recommendations on the design of tweets in your services have become mandatory. With the new version of the requirements, tweets should look like nothing other than Twitter dictates. This means that, for example, you can not display comments next to tweets or allow you to send a link to a tweet on VKontakte, and you must also place the Twitter logo or follow button in the upper right corner. In fact, this innovation declares VKontakte out of law (with their function of viewing tweets without transition), as well as any sites that collect and display custom pictures from tweets (Section 6b ).
2. No application can work without OAuth authorization. That is, all our test requests or even api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=i_compman typed in the browser will stop working. In fact, quite a small number of applications used this feature, mainly due to the strong limit on the number of allowed requests (150 per hour), but for one-time requests such an opportunity was simply necessary. I doubt that this restriction will somehow affect the botnet and the activity of spammers, the situation is more like the one when the hand is cut off due to a sore thumb.
3. Restrictions on the number of requests also changed: if earlier 350 requests per hour were allocated to one user, then with the new version, the restrictions will be individual for each type of request (endpoint). So, for example, requests for the tape of tweets can be limited to 60 times per hour, but we can make a request for information about the user up to 720 times per hour. In fact, this is the most innocuous change, which, however, will affect every developer of applications for Twitter. But at the same time, it is not clear why it is necessary to limit the intensity of requests to such small numbers: google allows millions of requests per day, and VKontakte no more than three requests per second (10,000 requests per hour).

Other changes are not so significant and affect a small part of the developers, but a significant part of popular applications (TweetBot, Instagram, etc.).
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Inventors of devices with a built-in client for Twitter (iPhone, for example) will be required to certify a pre-installed application to meet all requirements.

If you think your application will be used by more than a million people, or you already have a client for Twitter with more than 100,000 users, you will need to contact Twitter Inc. to get permission to continue their activities. This may mean that you may be asked to include promoted tweets on the ribbon to continue the user base collection or to do a flip every time a new user is authorized in the application :).

The published document emphasizes that this is only part of the innovations that await us in version 1.1. After its release, we will have 6 months to change our applications, after which the current version of the API will be disabled.

At the very end of the document, the Twitter administration is trying to justify its actions with the desire to build a clean ecosystem around innovative applications that focus on working with business processes and analytics, instead of “occupying applications trying to imitate or replace the user experience set by Twitter”.

Further, the text directly mentions Tweetbot and Echofon - the main competitors of the Twitter application for the iPhone, the war with which has been going on for a long time, so it can be said with confidence that such a step on Twitter is carried out solely for mercenary motives. I bet that soon we will be obliged to show advertising tweets to our users.

Of course, no one ever doubted that Twitter had complete power over its API and would manipulate it, but we always hoped that the service would develop only for the better. Now, there are big doubts on this point, because if you are ready to rewrite and tighten the rules on Twitter because of a win-win with several popular clients, you can easily imagine how one day your application will be outlawed.