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
APIs are used to communicate between systems (it’s the middleman between systems), where the API just exposes an interface that other developers can use. Developers that call the API don’t care how the API works, what it does or where/how it gets the data you want, all you care about is that you get what you wanted.
Imagine a restaurant; you come in, sit at a table and a waitress comes. You tell the waitress what you want to order, then the waitress brings you your meal.
Now, you don’t care how the meal was made, who cooked it, or from which ingredients, likewise you also don’t care what the waitress had to do in order to get and bring you your meal. All you care is that they brought you your meal and you didn’t have to do anything else other than tell the waitress what you wanted.
The waitress is the API in this case (the middleman between you and the kitchen), the kitchen is the server’s backend and the customer is the developer.
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