Twitter recently announced they will no longer support free access to the Twitter API. Everyone seems up in arms about it and I can’t figure out what an API even is. What would doing something like this actually affect?
I’ve tried looking up what an API is, but I can’t really wrap my head around it.
Edit: I’ve had so many responses to read through and there’s been a ton of helpful explanations! Much appreciated everyone 🙂 thanks for keeping this doofus in the know
In: 419
Without analogies: it’s a way to programmatically interface with Twitter (= to interact with Twitter from code).
When you pull up Twitter you’re shown a nice visual interface with text and other types of media (sound, images, animations, videos) nicely laid out there. You may also be nagged to log in, to install the app, shown ads, etc. Your device is fingerprinted by them, your activity is logged, and so on.
As a programmer you don’t need or want this. You want to just query for things and receive responses. Or maybe you want to do bulk operations (scrape all tweets of x). Or subscribe for events (grab tweet if x sent one, etc).
This way bots (malicious and harmless ones) and applications could be built on top of Twitter. You could have Twitlonger check a post, grab all the tweet contents, and unroll for you. And so on.
By not providing an API this becomes harder to do, as developers will need to access the same interface a person does, and tear away all the irrelevant parts first. Even worse is when business interest doesn’t align with this, and the site is actively trying to throw off people’s code from being able to do so.
Now, that’s not what they’re doing – they’re making it paid for. But there’s little difference in practice sometimes. Whether this is a bad or a good thing, I cannot tell you. But providing free does cost Twitter bandwidth, therefore money, so it’s not like they wouldn’t have anything going for the decision.
Latest Answers