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
TL;DR it’s a standardised way of talking to the machine – a list of commands you can give and what sort of answers you’ll get back.
It’s just a description of how to talk to something and what happens when you do.
So for example if you wanted to write a program that gets all of Elon Musk’s tweets, there needs to be some way to ask twitter’s server for that list, and also some description of the format that list will be in when it comes back so that you can actually read it.
This means that as long as the API stays the same, Twitter could change all their systems around behind the scenes and your program will still work – or you could change your whole program around and Twitter won’t care because you’re both still asking the same question and getting the same answer.
Latest Answers