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
It stands for “Application Programming Interface.” It’s the way that programs communicate with each other. The “interface” is the set of things you can ask a program to do, and the format of the data you will send to it or receive from it. For example, the twitter API lets you get the content of tweets, post tweets, get profiles, etc. It defines how you make requests, and how it will respond to them.
Lots of bot accounts and third-party apps use the twitter API. Getting rid of the free tier will likely reduce the “ecosystem” of apps that use it. It probably won’t affect bot traffic much because the people who run those can afford to pay. It will more likely affect people who are developing apps or websites that integrate with twitter as hobby projects or startups. It will make the barrier to entry higher, which means less people will try out their ideas, which ultimately means twitter will have a narrower reach.
Most large companies that are interested in growing and especially in selling user’s data provide a free tier of API access so that they can increase the number of people using the service. Getting rid of the free tier is probably a way to try to get more revenue, but I bet they are assuming that it won’t negatively impact their user counts and reach. I also bet that is a bad assumption.
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