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It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients and the new owner has removed access. Very disappointing if he has, particularly if he's done
by samwillis 4y ago
It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients and the new owner has removed access. Very disappointing if he has, particularly if he's done it with zero notice too.
He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on each tweet a couple of months ago.
I wander if the new policy is that you can't have an app that's main feature is replicating the existing functionality of twitters main app. That seems to be the rumour over there.
Publishing apps like Buffer and Typefully are still working.
- raverbashing 4y agoNah, most likely Elon pulled the plug on one of those servers that "nobody knew what it was used for" and brought the API down (or maybe API prod was running in somebody's computer and their office got evicted - who knows)
- samwillis 4y agoIt's clear that it's not a general API outage, specific "reader" apps have been removed/blocked, including from peoples "authorised apps" in their accounts. This is not an "API Outage", I think we can be 99.9% sure it's a removal of specific apps.
- Nextgrid 4y agoCould it just be an anti-abuse system going wrong, and reader apps are targeted because they exceed some threshold? Even with Musk's antics I don't see what would they gain by blocking API clients without announcing it - it would take Musk 30 seconds to tweet "oh btw third-party clients are done for" and would at least give everyone clarity.
- samwillis 4y agoOk, so you may be right and my estimate of 99.9% is probably over zealous. But to play devils advocate, say you are thinking of removing third party apps. You want to test the waters and see if users who use them continue to visit at the same rate when forced to use the official client. You schedule a quite "blocking" of the apps for the evening PT, your team can happily sleep through the noise generated and have the data in the morning from Asia/Europe of how people reacted. In the morning you make the call as to whether to stick with the plan or say it was an errant moderation bot. That may be to much 4d chess though...
- is_true 4y agoElon, the real life chaos monkey
- 93po 4y agoyeah he probably grabbed an extension cord, unplugging the toaster that twitter is currently running on, to strangle a baby and take its candy
- nigamanth 4y agoI bet there are people who make Twitter applications for a living. How is he damaging.
- samwillis 4y agoOh sure, I feel incredibly sorry for small business and indi-developers who may loose their income from this. I hope they have contingency plans for this eventuality and have started to diversify. There is also a whole ecosystem of "publisher" apps like Buffer and Typefully that haven't been blocked yet, if I was them I would be very worried right now.
- nigamanth 4y agoTwitter should've announced this, giving developers time to switch.
- onion2k 4y agoYou can't announce anything if you've fired the comms team.
- jsjohnst 4y ago> You can't announce anything if you've fired the comms team. Elon fired the Tesla PR team and yet announcements still are made, usually as Tweets from him. It sucks, but a comms team isn’t necessary assuming you are ok with substandard communication.
- onion2k 4y agoand yet announcements still are made Elon's tweets aren't the same as announcements from Twitter. He tweets as an individual. Twitter, the company, is a blackhole as far as comms goes. There is no news in any official capacity from the company any more.
- 4y ago
- mrtksn 4y agoDoes anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on. I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy? So: 1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, making it switching out of Twitter frictionless. 2. Provide extra functionality for non-Twitter posts, encouraging the use of the non-Twitter services. 3. Once have a good traction, penalize Twitter post to further push non-Twitter adoption. Eventually remove Twitter support completely. 4. Profit??
- black_puppydog 4y agoyou get into an armsrace where twitter will obfuscate the markup to just wear out the scraper devs. which they can, because $$$
- mrtksn 4y agoThen just OCR the rendered output. It's cheap and easy these days.
- mlatu 4y agoi heard it works best on iphones, best of luck
- mrtksn 4y agoApple’s vision framework is actually very good, so effective on-device extraction is really just a few lines of code on iPhone(all Apple device tbh).
- tsimionescu 4y agoGood luck OCR-ing images and videos, though. Twitter isn't just text.
- amelius 4y agoCan't we have the EU force them to provide an API and thus interoperability with competitors? Also, the whole silo thing reminds me of the old telephony days. We got over that, so what is the problem now?
- jeroenhd 4y agoI don't think they'll force a specific API, but the DMA forces messaging companies to interoperate and I wouldn't think Twitter would be exempted. I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would force Twitter to interoperate with ActivityPub if they go so far as to disable API access. The EU already has their own Mastodon server so some people already have knowledge of the possibilities of decentralised social media and they also have a huge anti-big-tech stance.
- Nextgrid 4y ago> Can't we have the EU force them to provide an API and thus interoperability with competitors? Maybe, but it took them over 4 years to rule that Facebook was breaching the GDPR even though a just a casual reading of the legislation would've given you this answer. Maybe they'll "force" them... in so long that Twitter may not even exist anymore.
- mlindner 4y agoWhy are people jumping to a ridiculous conclusion about the API being removed, especially because it's literally in the middle of the night in California? Like why assume the much more reasonable opinion that it's simply an outage.
- WJW 4y agoBecause the API is still up for other apps.
- Hamuko 4y agoAPI keys are showing up for developers as "suspended".
- ubermonkey 4y ago(Did you ever work in Houston, and does your first name start with M?)
- satvikpendem 4y agoThat is why companies should always stay vigilant about platform risk. In general, own your platform, don't built your business on someone else's platform, it is too easy for them to deplatform you on their whim.
- misnome 4y agoIt's worked for them for the past 12 years
- nkozyra 4y agoSure. But remember when the API went from "build something cool with our data!" to "build something cool with a limited set of data" to "pay us a ton of money for full data" to "pay us a ton of money for full data if you meet these internal requirements that assuredly mean we will monitor to make sure you don't compete with us" to ... well, we'll have to see.
- fsw 4y agoYeah, just start your own Twitter if you want to build an app for it.
- soraminazuki 4y agoOr you could run your own website. This would also let your viewers browse your website freely without being hindered by a login wall.
- nicbou 4y agoNo matter what most of us do, we’re at the mercy of a single search engine.