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Twitter's Relationship With Third-Party Apps is Messy -- But It's Not Over (mashable.com)
It's a day that developers of some of the most high-profile Twitter third-party apps have dreaded, though it's one they've long-known was coming: Twitter is finally shutting off some of the developer tools that popular apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific have heavily relied on. From a report: With the change, many third-party Twitter apps will lose some functionality, like the ability to instantly refresh users' Twitter feeds and send push notifications. It won't make these apps unusable -- in some cases the apps' users may not even immediately notice the changes -- but it's a drastic enough change that developers have mounted a public campaign against the decision.
Now, Twitter is finally weighing in on the changes, after months of publicly declining to comment on the state of third-party Twitter clients. The verdict, unsurprisingly, is complicated. The company is adamant that its goal isn't to single out these developers. The company is retiring these APIs out of necessity, it says, as it's no longer feasible to support them."We are sunsetting very old, legacy software that we don't have an ability to keep supporting for practical reasons," says Ian Caims, group product manager at Twitter. At the same time, though, the company has also made a conscious decision not to create new APIs with the same functionality. Here's how Twitter's senior director of product management Rob Johnson explains the move: "It is now time to make the hard decision to end support for these legacy APIs -- acknowledging that some aspects of these apps would be degraded as a result. Today, we are facing technical and business constraints we can't ignore. The User Streams and Site Streams APIs that serve core functions of many of these clients have been in a 'beta' state for more than 9 years, and are built on a technology stack we no longer support.
Now, Twitter is finally weighing in on the changes, after months of publicly declining to comment on the state of third-party Twitter clients. The verdict, unsurprisingly, is complicated. The company is adamant that its goal isn't to single out these developers. The company is retiring these APIs out of necessity, it says, as it's no longer feasible to support them."We are sunsetting very old, legacy software that we don't have an ability to keep supporting for practical reasons," says Ian Caims, group product manager at Twitter. At the same time, though, the company has also made a conscious decision not to create new APIs with the same functionality. Here's how Twitter's senior director of product management Rob Johnson explains the move: "It is now time to make the hard decision to end support for these legacy APIs -- acknowledging that some aspects of these apps would be degraded as a result. Today, we are facing technical and business constraints we can't ignore. The User Streams and Site Streams APIs that serve core functions of many of these clients have been in a 'beta' state for more than 9 years, and are built on a technology stack we no longer support.
They don't want people reading their twitter feeds in chronological order and free of ads. The website and first-party apps show ads and alter the order of messages to suggest content that the company thinks the user should see. Third party apps don't interfere or give the company power over the reader. Twitter hates that, and their strategy is to get all desktop users on web and mobile on first-party apps. They honestly are trying to kill off third-party devs and lie about it at every turn.
They are keeping the data inhouse and like another develpoer said, time to start scraping their website like a 1997 hobo
-dk
And 80% of the non-bot 20% is just marketing people trying to tune the system. If they kicked all those people and Bots off, they would realize that actual consumers moved to other social platforms years ago.
Twitter makes nothing from the app developers using these APIs. In addition, the API stream doesn't have ads, so they make nothing from those who use 3rd party apps. They have to spend money maintaining these APIs and make nothing in return. Imagine you were a business manager responsible for revenue at Twitter, or a programmer/engineer tasked with maintaining the APIs. Would you think it's a good move to continue to maintain them?
Parsing the website isn't going to be beneficial. They're not completely cutting of API access. They're just doing away with a few things like live-streaming. That means you'll now have to refresh to get new messages. Parsing the site is going to require the same.
How do I view the tweets in chronological order without my Chrome extension?
The one thing that made Twitter reliable and usable for me was the chronological timeline, and the only way to get that was third party apps. Without that, the app is useless for me, and a lot of other people who rely on it for getting important updates. I'm expecting a mass exodus soon.