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
You are a baker. You bake variety of baked goods. You sometimes take orders from people – but those people arent bakers. They have no idea how to tell you to use specific mix of grain, or to add exact amount of oil. You also dont want to just let them into your kitchen and let them do what they please.
So you hire a youngster, and place him near your door. You give customers a list of words that they can give the youngster – such as “More puffy”, “No wheat”, “less crust” etc. Then the youngster will come to you in the kitchen and translate it to actual recipes – “person A needs more grain, person B wants the expensive flour, etc”.
API is a way for you to interact with a closed system. Its like a box with buttons, pressing a button sends (or receives) a specific piece of information to or from the closed system. You can press a button that says “Give me list of active users”, and box would print out a piece of paper with the list of users. You dont need to know how it stores this data, or how it accesses it, or how it prints it. You just need to know the correct phrase (“Give me list of active users”) to trigger the effect (prints out list of users).
Twitter restricting free access to API means that you now have to pay to be able to press these buttons.
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