With the release of API v2 these days, Twitter is once again a developer friendly company, allowing them possibilities that for years limited. Let’s see the trajectory of that disastrous time, and what possibilities there are now.
The relationship between Twitter and developers has gone through many moments, although lately they have been very bad. Do not forget that, almost literally, the platform is today what it is thanks to them. From its existence trying to contribute to the social network, when it was only the web, functions as acclaimed today as mutes were born. From Tweetie, for example, a customer they later bought, the “swipe down to update“, how popular it is today in any operating system.
For years, the desktop and mobile web were so far away from giving a good experience that practically any power user used clients like Twicca, Seesmic, Tweetbot, Echofon, etc, etc. From a certain point on, Twitter got serious with the official applications and delivered a more decent product, which is not that good yet.
From there, it artificially limited the capabilities of the API that it delivered to developers. Then things got even worse, as it stopped giving the possibility of adopting new functions such as surveys. Third-party customers became, officially, in second-rate citizens.
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The first steps of the new reality
Thanks to the API v2, one of the most prominent Twitter clients, you can, for example, create surveys, which as we have said before, were not supported and led many users to not know that an interrogative tweet required to choose an answer, since the interface did not show one.
But, without a doubt, the most important thing, and what will make Twitter clients flourish again, is this phrase that Twitter has written in a statement:
“We removed terms that restricted replication of the Twitter experience, including core Twitter features, as well as terms that required permission to have a large number of user tokens.”
With API 1.1, Twitter greatly limited tokens to third-party clients. In other words, only a very small number of users could log into Twitter with that client. Once a certain figure was exceeded, the developer would have to pay Twitter to offer the product to more users, something that is not that they did not want to do, rather, it made the model totally unsustainable. And that’s how great applications fell along the way. Especially the free ones, as there was no limitation whatsoever.
Another big problem was the calls they could make to the API during a certain time. This greatly limited the quality of applications, since the delivery of notifications or updates that could be made per minute were greatly decimated. Now, all of that has relaxed. It’s just a matter of waiting to regain the lost glory.