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Twitter To Developers: Please Love Us Again (mashable.com)

Posted by msmash on from the fixing-relationships dept.

Twitter wants to fix its relationship with developers, it said Thursday. The company, which sold its developer platform to Google earlier this year, said moving forward it intends to be more transparent with developers and provide them with more insight. From a report: While some continue to call the end of Twitter (and others gave up on the product years ago), the company is prioritizing more tools for developers in order to grow the site. "These efforts represent a massive new engineering and product investment in the future of the Twitter API platform, and in our developer ecosystem," Andy Piper, Twitter's staff developer advocate, wrote in a blog post announcement. One of the steps involves creating an easier to use service overall. Twitter offers several developer products, including free APIs, services from data analysis group Gnip, and the enterprise-level Twitter API product. Twitter plans to simplify its offerings by releasing one way to get access to the Firehouse (access to all tweets in real-time), one way to access Twitter search, and one access for account activity.

3 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. There's an easy way to do this. by H3lldr0p · · Score: 5, Informative

    Stop fucking around with the API and stop fucking around with access to it. You need to build trust and you can't do that when you change rules willy-nilly all the time.

    The reason why developers fled your platform is because you never let it stabilize long enough for people to do things with it. Then, if memory serves, you closed it. And then you sold it.

    So the question becomes one of why would anyone want to invest the time to figure the API and platform out if you're just going to pull the football away without warning?

  2. Will Twitter drop the "consumer secret"? by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    One big problem with the Twitter API that I'm aware of is the requirement of an OAuth "consumer secret", which I've mentioned before.

    Twitter's implementation of OAuth 1 requires each application to sign all requests with a private key that an application's developer is obligated to keep secret even from the application's users. This is fine for a web application that runs on a server. But a native application, particularly one distributed as free software, can't avoid exposing its private key to the user. Twitter can and does revoke keys that leak. Though most other services have switched to the more cookie-like OAuth 2 spec, which has an option to allow desktop applications to operate without a private key, Twitter has persisted in requiring this idiocy, which both the OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 RFCs discourage.

    Does this new announcement include a move away from a mandatory "consumer secret" for applications that run on a desktop or mobile computer?

  3. LOL, that's rich... by XSportSeeker · · Score: 3, Informative

    Remember when Twitter shut down access to 3rd party access?
    http://www.digitaltrends.com/m...
    https://www.independent.co.uk/...
    http://www.idownloadblog.com/2...
    http://news.softpedia.com/news...
    http://www.eweek.com/developme...