image courtesy of semantica.co.za
Have you noticed some of your Twitter applications failing recently? On June 11 Twitter retired the original version of its API, the one used by countless third party applications to present Twitter information. The Twitter API changes have been going on for over a year — here’s an August 2012 PC World story with good background.
As Twitter evolves, it wants more control over its data, and the user experience. As I wrote last August, the company is trying to morph from a cool, fun tool into a media company. It made sense when the company was young to give third party developers unfettered access to the API, to make the service as ubiquitous as possible.
Now Twitter wants more control. They also don’t want third party developers producing applications that provide experiences similar to the core Twitter experience.
A lot of the changes in the API make sense, and based on what I’ve read they will make the immense traffic load easier for Twitter to handle. They also have caused inconvenience for end users, and in some cases have effectively killed applications without the resources to make the switch.
An old but trusted plugin failed for me, Tweet Blender. It was an easy way to add a scroll of Twitter accounts to a site. Last week I replaced it on this site with Twitter’s official version of a list widget. (Tip — don’t try to create a search widget, there seems to be a 25 account cutoff, create your list first and then make it a widget.) It’s hard to be too angry at Twitter, since the developers of Tweet Blender hadn’t updated the plugin in two years and were radio silent when it stopped working this month.
It’s a balancing act Twitter is attempting right now. They still need developers, and of course they still need millions of users, who create the content Twitter is trying to monetize. If they execute poorly, a competitive service will emerge.