Twitter Will Break Third-Party Clients in June (apps-of-a-feather.com)

Come this June, Twitter says it will disable "streaming services", a feature third-party Twitter clients such as Talon, Tweetbot, Twitterrific use to stream the timeline and send push notifications. A replacement for streaming service, the Account Activity API, isn't being made available to third-party developers. In a letter, developers wrote: The new Account Activity API is currently in beta testing, but third-party developers have not been given access and time is running out. With access we might be able to implement some push notifications, but they would be limited at the standard level to 35 Twitter accounts -- our products must deliver notifications to hundreds of thousands of customers. No pricing has been given for Enterprise level service with unlimited accounts -- we have no idea if this will be an affordable option for us and our users.

We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year. This change affects people who use third-party Twitter apps. All software platforms are affected, but it's worse on iOS and Android where users rely on push notifications to know when something happens on Twitter.

Comments

Dumb businesses

[DogDude]

So a few dummies built their entire businesses around relying on the good will of a single completely unrelated business. Big deal. They deserve to go out of business for such a dumb, short-sighted decision.

Re:Dumb businesses

[angel'o'sphere]

Twitter is a web site.
It is displayed by the browsers I use on macOS/OS X just fine.

What idiots Twitter are

[SuperKendall]

In the midst of a big push for people to leave social media, they are trying harder and hard to push people away.

If I were Twitter I'd have zero API limits, and let anyone make a client that desired it. You could easily work in advertising to that model, say embedded ad messages, or some kind of ad feed that would be mandatory for any Twitter client to support in some way that would be reviewed.

I admit it, I'm a Twitter user

[93 Escort Wagon]

Twitter has been the place to find breaking news - especially for sports - for several years, which is the main reason I have stayed on the platform. But Twitter's management doesn't seem to know what to do with the product, and each change makes it less useful.

Take Notifications, for instance. Until a short while ago, Notifications worked exactly how you would expect - they were heads' ups regarding new direct messages, announcements about your account, etc. But at some recent point Twitter decided this was apparently an "underused opportunity" or some such nonsense, and started piling garbage into there. Now, whenever I get a notification alert, it's invariably something stupid like "so-and-so retweeted a tweet from such-and-such". I won't be surprised if, in the coming months, we start seeing "sponsored" notifications - e.g. advertisements. Long story short... I no longer even look at the Notifications panel, and have a permanent (and ever-increasing) tag indicating the number of unread items there.

Then there are the "Who to Follow" and "While You Were Away" injections into my timeline. You could argue the former might be worthwhile, if there appeared to be any logic behind it... but the suggestions seem to make little sense, and I suspect at least some of them are paid. With the latter - Twitter is all about recency, so why would I really care about a tweet from 12 hours ago? Anything worthwhile would have shown up on the more traditional media outlets at this point, and with much greater detail (and context).

And "Sponsored Tweets" - just call them ads, since that's what they are. I have yet to see one remotely interesting.

Bottom line - I find myself going to Twitter less and less. It still seems like an interesting idea in theory, but they're hell-bent on making it worthless.