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 a programmer’s menu.
If a programmer orders, say, all the tweets on your account with the keyword “retweet” in the last 24 hours, they can connect to an API and ask for that.
Twitter will do the hard back-end work, and your computers can request that item from the menu any time you like.
It’s used when you want to, say, show your recent Tweets inside your website like some companies do, or programmatically send a tweet when something happens (e.g. some IT teams will use a Twitter account for automatic notifications to the entire team if something goes down, etc.). Or you might combine it with the Facebook API so that whenever you tweet, it also creates an identical Facebook post or vice-versa.
However, there’s a huge burden there. Someone has to do the groundwork on the backend to provide that API. Someone is “cooking the meal” that you ordered from the menu, and while they often limit how many “calls” you can do (i.e. how many things you can order from the menu each day), there’s a lot of work happening on your behalf.
Generally speaking, API access is one of those nice little features that costs a company a lot of money to operate but actually drives users to them because they can automate, integrate, and customise the way they use your service.
Twitter are just being dicks about it because they’re trying to cut costs… and that means that almost certainly people will start to move away from Twitter because the only way to post a tweet will soon be via the official Twitter website… and that means there’s no easy automation, the interface can change under you all the time, it’s hard to integrate with other systems or APIs, etc.
It’s the computing equivalent of Ford insisting that they use a special screw that nothing but a Ford screwdriver can open, so everyone who works on a Ford car must buy a Ford screwdriver to do so. Except they are liable to change that screwdriver design every few months, and won’t help you changeover to their special Ford screws at all.
So you previously had a toolkit that works on EVERY model of car, and now you need a toolkit that literally only works on Fords and that you can’t use for anything else.
How well do you think that would work out for Ford? That’s how well it’s going to work out for Twitter.
Latest Answers