Twitter on Wednesday officially released version 1.1 of its Application Programming Interface (API) despite the severe criticism from the developers for making the interface restrictive, especially with the user token limit. Twitter, however, has attempted to clear some air about the some aspects of the new interface.
“Based on feedback after the original blog post, we felt it was important to clarify one thing about user tokens and the 100,000 user token limit,” Jason Costa, who works on the company’s platform, wrote on the company’s blog.
“The 100,000 user token limit applies only to the small set of clients replicating the core Twitter experience. It does not apply to the majority of other applications in the broader ecosystem.” In simple words, those apps that don’t drive direct traffic to Twitter can only have 100,000 users at a time.
Twitter has given developers time till March 5 to comply with the new rules. After March 5, Twitter will simply cut off access to the API feed.
Mashable has pointed out some of the changes mentioned in Twitter’s overview of the final API that were previously unknown. Twitter is no longer supporting RSS, XML and Atom. This means apps that use RSS, XML or Atom will need to shift to JSON or other API methods by March 5, 2013, the site said in its report.
It may be recalled that v1.1 of the API sparked controversy when the company revealed a few weeks ago. The new rules make it mandatory for the developers to have authentication from Twitter before having access to the API. In fact, every time they seek access, they will need Twitter’s permission.
“To prevent malicious use of the Twitter API and gain an understanding of what types of applications are accessing the API in order to evolve it to meet the needs of developers, it’s important to have visibility into the activity on the Twitter API and the applications using the platform,” the company wrote in a blog post.
A lot of developers criticised the changes alleging Twitter was trying to do away with third party apps to make space for advertisers. The rules also came under fire for being ambigious. Popular Twitter apps such as Tweetbot shelved its alpha version last week. Moreover, the beta version of the app which didn’t allow to add new users.
Twitter is still inviting feedback on its API changes. To contribute, visit the thread around API v1.1.
Source: Twitter Blog
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