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Introducing Twitter premium APIs
- farnsworthy 9y agoIs everything starting around $149+, or only search? I suppose that's understandable, but I think it would be cool if they implemented something more akin to the AWS pricing model (S3, for example, as tweet streams remind me more of this than of enterprise-level pricing).
- andypiper 9y agoThe only premium API we've announced today is 30-day search, but watch the roadmap (https://t.co/roadmap https://t.co/roadmap) for future updates.
- komali2 9y agoAnother user suggested that a lot of searches could result in massive spam results that suck away from the rate limit and clutter analysis. What is Twitter doing to combat this? For example, I reported this account: https://twitter.com/ksfAKBARI https://twitter.com/ksfAKBARI for being spam account about 3 weeks ago, and nothing has been done yet. I noted in my report that it has a massive follower network of hundreds of other spam accounts. Why isn't Twitter at least tackling these extremely obvious spam accounts?
- nl 9y agoSpambots aren't against Twitters ToS. That one in particular might be part of a large bot network, but hasn't actually posted anything since 2012. Even so, automatic posting is explicitly allowed by the developer ToS, with the only restriction that you don't cause undue load (which appears to be around how often you post). To be clear - the only things which reliably get accounts banned on Twitter are Doxing people and actual terrorist accounts. However (based on how Gnip and the public API work), they do some level of spam filtering by default. On some APIs you can turn that filter off.
- komali2 9y ago> Spambots aren't against Twitters ToS. Hooooly shit, this explains so much.
- lux 9y agoIs that the price for Premium Search access? It's giving me a 404 error clicking the 'See pricing' link on https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing
- andypiper 9y agoAre you logged in to the page?
- jamestimmins 9y agoSame here, both logged in and logged out.
- andypiper 9y agoThanks for the note - working on that. https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing should work. There's free sandbox access, and then tiered pricing for increased access and additional features like counts and the enrichments.
- philtar 9y agoI have a feeling in my gut that it's too late.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- benwilber0 9y agotwitter is out of ideas.
- bpicolo 9y agoAPI access to twitter is a huge business for a ton of different enterprises. Everything from customer support/happiness products to finance wants the twitter firehose. This is a totally reasonable and good business avenue for them to care about / explore.
- abootstrapper 9y agoTwitter's current plan is to execute on all the ideas their user base was talking about 5+ years ago.
- passivepinetree 9y agoIs there an available history of Twitter's APIs over the years? IIRC it was initially open, and then they locked it down so many 3rd party apps for Twitter had to shut down, and now they're sort of opening it up again? What's the deal?
- porfirium 9y agoThey never "locked it down", they just rate limited some vital endpoints and never bothered to add endpoints for new, important features. My own recommendation: disassemble any official app (for example, the Android one with apktool) and get the tokens and endpoints and do whatever the hell you want without paying a cent.
- komali2 9y agoI feel like you could do this just watching network traffic, and judging by the fact that nobody's done it, I also feel like there's some mechanism preventing this that I'm not knowledgeable enough in the subject to be aware of.
- porfirium 9y agoYou can't do this just watching network traffic because the apps use HTTPS + certificate pinning. And you can do it if you want. I do it. I'm sure many more people do it.
- passivepinetree 9y agoOut of curiosity, what do you use the decompiled tokens/endpoints for?
- porfirium 9y agoNefarious purposes, mostly. I can crawl without rate limits (well, there are rate limits, but it's much harder to hit them), and I also can spam a lot without getting my account flagged (but it eventually gets flagged, of course). By spamming I don't mean the usual "click on this link and I'll show you my tits" spam; if you create a useful bot that sends "expected" mentions (for example in response to mentions you receive, and not just spam) it will get banned in a matter of hours. With their "secret" tokens, it won't get banned.
- meritt 9y agoAs the pricing appears to be based on # of requests and/or # of tweets consumed, does it have a `include_spambots=false` filter or do we have to pay for the pleasure of wading through spam?
- komali2 9y agoI linked this elsewhere in this thread, but I reported this obvious spam account, with hundreds of spam followers, weeks ago and nothing has been done: https://twitter.com/ksfAKBARI https://twitter.com/ksfAKBARI I feel like twitter must not be taking spambots seriously, or has malicious intent to keep them there, because out of hundreds (thousands?) of employees they can't get a team onboard to shut these obvious accounts down. I mean, it's been reported and it still exists. Either the report log is huge or it's being ignored.
- ranman 9y agoI'm still waiting for that webhook API they talked about 2 years ago.
- Veratyr 9y agoThis is a good start. Gnip seems to basically be invite only (I've tried contacted them multiple times and have not once received a response) and the public API is so limited it's near useless. I'd still rather everyone move to Mastodon.
- s73ver_ 9y agoSomething tells me that'd be more tedious to get the same kind of data, what with having to go to several instances to get it, instead of one place.
- WorldMaker 9y agoThat sounds like a feature to me.
- andypiper 9y agoGnip is Twitter's enterprise API business with annual subscriptions to firehose and decahose access. This is month-to-month billing for improved API access and data quality.
- zippergz 9y agoI wish it were true pay-as-you-go rather than starting you in a sandbox and then jumping immediately to $150. Working on a small side project, $150/mo is a lot of money in the beginning, especially if I'm doing a relatively small number of requests. I guess I need to see what the sandbox entails, but if it's not real live twitter data, this still feels like a big step function in cost from free to premium. Just charge me per-API call or on the amount of data transferred with no minimum.
- nkg 9y agoWhy is Twitter API so open ? I have been playing with it for a few weeks and I can find almost every data I want. How does it benefit them ?
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoEcosystem lock-in. I remember shortly after Twitter launched there were many copycat microblogging services and the community had grand ideas of an "SMTP for Microblogging" so Mentions, Retweets and the like would work in a distributed fashion between service-providers, you could even run your own fully federated microblog off a Raspberry Pi in your garage if you wanted. Twitter kept themselves in the lead - not just by delivering a superior user-experience (Nazis and trolls notwithstanding...) but also cultivating a developer community in a way that kept people off rival platforms - before stabbing them in the back in recent years (e.g. no support for polls in third-party clients). This announcement is a continuation of the strategy: Twitter is making more data about their platform available, other platforms aren't as open, so people will stick with Twitter because their data is available - and it also benefits them directly because these "Premium" APIs do cost money to access: > Pricing for these elevated tiers of the Search Tweets API starts at $149/month
- cisanti 9y agoThey somehow bribed the media using it. Without the massive free advertising from media and President(s) Twitter would have been long dead.
- ceejayoz 9y ago> How does it benefit them ? Their search product started as a third-party integration (Summize). Their official iOS app started as a third-party app (Tweetie). They've benefited immensely.
- ship_it 9y agoBecause Twitter is basically useless without doing that.
- me_bx 9y agoA few years ago, the free search API could retrieve tweets since the beginning of twitter (although twitter did not guarantee completeness of the results): https://web.archive.org/web/20150311065138/https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/search https://web.archive.org/web/20150311065138/https://dev.twitt... Twitter then limited this API endpoint to data from the past seven days only, and now just introduces a paid version for only last 30 days data. I find it fair to charge for elevated API access. On the other hand, the 30 days limit for the paid version is pretty ridiculous. Makes it more worth to just scrape the free online advanced search...
- andypiper 9y agoThat's categorically not the case - the index for the search API has always been around 7 days since Twitter acquired Summize (which is where the search API came from). There was never an artificial limitation such as the one you're describing. From the page you're linking to from the archive: "The Search API is not complete index of all Tweets, but instead an index of recent Tweets. At the moment that index includes between 6-9 days of Tweets." Scraping the Twitter website is against the terms of service and may result in permanent suspension of access.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- me_bx 9y agoMy bad, my memory failed me, I thought remembering being able to perform search on the historical tweets via the search endpoint.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gboudrias 9y ago> Scraping the Twitter website is against the terms of service and may result in permanent suspension of access. Scraping is always against the ToS, so no surprise there. I doubt it's really ever stopped anyone.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoTwitter already betrayed their entire dev base all those years ago when they effectively killed off all 3rd party clients by setting a lifetime cap on oauth tokens per developer just so they could force users to use their clients which inject ppa/ppc ads into the stream (and then didn’t even bother keeping those clients up to date, pissing both the developers and their users off in one go). Stupidest move ever on their end. All they’d have had to do is mandate the inclusion of promoted tweets in the firehouse and they’d have kept developers loyal to their platform while raking in the cash.
- rhinoceraptor 9y agoAlso, if I’m not mistaken, retweeting and hashtags were done first by third party clients. Even the word tweet was coined in an email Blaine Cook sent discussing twitter’s auth API for 3rd party clients.
- Simon_says 9y agoSurprisingly, though, the word "twit" predates the company.
- Raphmedia 9y agoThat's an old word. --- twit noun informal noun: twit; plural noun: twits a silly or foolish person.
- folli 9y agothatsthejoke.jpg.exe
- Simon_says 9y agoI know; it's joke.
- oliyoung 9y agoyou were right in that they weren't Twitter's idea, but they were community driven. @ and hashtags came from IRC and retweets (back when it was the RT....) just evolved
- ben174 9y agoI always find it humorous that Twitter was the creator of the HTTP response code: 420: Enhance Your Calm Returned when an application is being rate limited for making too many requests. https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/response-codes https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/response-codes
- lightbyte 9y agoIs this not what 429 is for? Their docs [1] also suggest 429 is what they are actually returning [1]: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/rate-limiting https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/rate-limiting
- caio1982 9y agoGood for them, I honestly hope it works business-wise as they want and it makes developers satisfied. However, I'm afraid Twitter the company has got the same sort of trust issues as Google from the developers POV. They need to address this specifically, if they want people to believe their premium API move is for real.
- freedomben 9y agoGoogle is obviously a huge company with many different products, but I've had great success and satisfaction with many of their APIs. What sort of problems are you referring to?
- wastedhours 9y agoI don't know that the testimonial in the post makes me feel better about the product to be honest "they couldn't provide us what we needed so we had to give away part of our company to pay through the nose for the privilege for that feature, so it's great they've released this now, years after it'd have been useful. How's that feature you're waiting on working out for ya?". I know it's the current thing to bash on Twitter, and I'm sure there are decent use cases out there, and glad they're finding extra revenue streams outside of ads, but the speed and level of iteration seems rather low considering the resources they have. Of course, I'm just a username on a website and have never scaled anything to 300m users, but like a lot of people, think Twitter could still be great... but seemingly still has a lot of miles to go. And highlighting that in an announcement post seems... strange
- Gabriel_Martin 9y agoAbsolutely not. Never again will I trust Twitter as a developer.
- toephu2 9y agoBecause once bitten twice shy and companies never change?
- Gabriel_Martin 9y agoPerhaps it's as simple as that. I dumped too many resources into my last effort: time designing, flying out, sitting down with their dev advocates, all a waste of my time. I shan't reward them for pulling the rug out, or make the same mistake again. Also, it's in solidarity with developers who invested even more than myself, years of time into apps, to be betrayed. That's an emphatic "hell no" from me dog.
- kimjongman 9y agoSay no to that bitch
- katpas 9y agoI immediately checked the date on the article after reading the headline. Thought it was a relic from the third party client days.
- tomkin 9y agoTwitter's biggest mistake was hiring thousands of people when they only needed 30. It doesn't need thousands of people. It doesn't even need 100. Twitter is not a technological marvel. It's something Oprah promoted, and Donald Trump bitches on. And now, it's an API with a (social) class-based access, and without irony, also promotes itself as a leader in conversation and exchange.
- agentdrtran 9y agoHow dumb do you have to be to think twitter could be run by 30 people? They probably have more than 30 account managers alone.
- itronitron 9y agoand they only need account managers because they are selling advertising. They could have chosen to monetize their platform another way but lacked the creativity to do so.
- mojowo11 9y agoWe'll never know whether your unstated genius creative idea for how to monetize Twitter would have worked. Tis a shame.
- itronitron 9y agoYeah, I'm certainly not going to post it here.
- Antrikshy 9y agoThat comment reminds me of Quora questions like this one: https://www.quora.com/I-am-confident-that-I-am-going-to-build-a-search-engine-that-will-compete-with-Google-at-least-in-the-smallest-scale-possible-first-but-for-now-I-dont-know-any-programming-What-should-I-do?srid=CbR https://www.quora.com/I-am-confident-that-I-am-going-to-buil...
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- hw 9y agoMy experience with Twitter API has been horrible to say the least. Plenty of API errors, service over capacity, and instability. So now I have to pay to get access to an API that's stable? Step 1 - build a product. make sure it has lots of bugs and is unstable. Step 2 - roll out a premium product that's the same product, just stable, and less buggy. Profit. How is charging for an API not a finger to the developer community? Facebook for example doesn't charge for their API access. They charge for the products that the API has access to. If I have access to a product, I shouldn't need to be charged for the APIs to access that product
- MichaelGG 9y agoInteresting. I found Twitter to be vastly better than other social media companies. Far better documentation (though weird complicated auth where I get 4 pieces of info for some reason). Far more stable and understandable. Twitter returns a ton of data in each response so there's no need to go making multiple requests. Compare to FB which is just a nightmare of trying to guess and figure things out. It's so bad. If it reflects their underlying model at all, their main codebase must be very difficult to work on. Charging is a welcome improvement over the previous situation: Deal with Gnip or other data brokers. They're "Enterprise". Get no information, have to deal with a long sales cycle and sales team, have to wade through tons of BS to figure out what you need. It sucks.
- hw 9y agoIn terms of documentation I do agree with you, although I suspect that's just due to the complexity of Facebook and its vast array of products, vs Twitter. My bad experiences have to do with the actual API calls themselves which aren't stable and occasionally times out or errors out. If anything I wish they would improve their API infrastructure as a whole instead of offering the improvements only on paid accounts. I can see charging for rate limits but not for system stability.
- herbst 9y agoFacebook is horrible. But Twitter was even better at some point. Compared to their v1 or even v2, v3 is a complicated mess
- danso 9y agoUntil info about the new endpoints and queries is released, I'm not rushing to get out my wallet, but at the very least it's encouraging to see any movement regarding the API. This seems like a vote of confidence that the basic API will be around for at least a few more years.
- andypiper 9y agohttps://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/search/overview/premium https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/search/overview...
- jakereps 9y ago> I wish these premium APIs were available during our first few years. As we grew, we quickly ran into data limitations that prevented expansion. Ultimately, we raised a round of funding in order to accelerate our growth with the enterprise APIs. With the premium APIs, we could have bootstrapped our business longer and scaled more efficiently. Quoting a company that is essentially saying they had to seek funding because of twitter limiting API access is an odd choice for this announcement.
- egypturnash 9y agoI wonder how many people "we came up with a new way to sell your data!" will send away from Twitter.
- ssvss 9y agoAnyone knows how much they charge for the gnip enterprise access.
- _pmf_ 9y agoOh boy. > However, this left a gap that made it painful for growing businesses to deliver scalable solutions to customers How about this: close your monetization gap yourself instead of pushing the problem downstream?
- jankotek 9y agoIs there a way to get copy of twitter entire dataset?