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
An API is simply how two things, software in this case, connect.
Once upon a time, every company that produced electricity had their own proprietary standard for how electrical devices would connect. This meant if you moved to the next town over, your toaster wouldn’t work and you would have to buy a new toaster( and lamp, and dishwasher, and…..) that worked with the new electrical company’s plug (assuming that the new cmpany even sells toasters) or you could try rewiring it yourself and hope not to burn your house down. Obviously this is madness.
At some point, countries standardized so that there is one plug (and voltage, and frequency) used in the US, one plug in the UK, one plug for most of Europe, etc. This means a standard interface for plugs, at least within a country.
An API is the same thing, but for software or web services. For instance, you could have software that tweets to certain people when something happens in the fire alarm system. This has been free and has had whole infrastructures built on this. Twitter is changing this to paid, which breaks lots of other software, and makes a lot of headaches for a lot of people.
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