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
To add on to other explanations and really emphasize why an API is useful:
Most websites/programs (let’s call them “apps” in general) are designed to be used by humans. As a human Twitter user, you can press buttons and type things in the app to follow people, search, and send your own tweets.
An API lets another computer program use the app, instead of a human. Of course, there are ways to imitate human input with a program, but they tend to be pretty inconvenient. With an API, you can conveniently write a computer program that uses Twitter, and do all the things a human would.
This is great if, for example, you need to do large Twitter searches to collect data (a human user would have to manually search and copy paste all the results—much easier to let the computer do it), or if you’re making a Twitter bot that collects news articles about a certain topic, or a customer service bot that responds to complaints from customers on your company’s Twitter, or any number of other uses.
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