Alex Omenye
Popular microblogging site Twitter has announced that users will have to pay to have access to its API, stating that the platform will stop offering free access to the Twitter API.
This is apparently one of the moves by Elon Musk to monetize the bird app after a previous attempt made to charge account owners with the blue verification ticks.
In a Twitter thread, the Twitter Developer account said the platform would be ending support for legacy v1.1 and the new v2 of its Twitter APIs.
“Twitter data are among the world’s most powerful data sets. We’re committed to enabling fast & comprehensive access so you can continue to build with us,” the Twitter Dev account said Thursday.
“Over the years, hundreds of millions of people have sent over a trillion tweets, with billions more every week.”
The company didn’t make it known when the changes would begin, but third-party services that work on Twitter API for access were originally reported to be experiencing problems as early as Thursday.
Following the recent modifications that saw Twitter shut down third-party clients, many other app developers became cautious about how they advanced development atop the Twitter API. This new change may force some developers to abandon their products or pass the cost on to their clients.
API means application programming interface. The Twitter API is a collection of programmatic endpoints that can be used to understand or construct the Twitter discourse. This API enables you to locate and get, interact with, or create a wide range of resources, including the following: Tweets. Users.
Thousands of developers utilize the Twitter API for a variety of purposes, including tracking changes among Twitter accounts and providing warnings. These are enjoyable side enterprises for those who are unwilling to pay fees for something that they are not monetizing.
Although neither Twitter nor its CEO, Elon Musk, have publicly commented on the API outage, The Information revealed on Saturday that internal Slack communications show that Twitter purposely disabled the API and hence access to services like Twitterbot.
There is also speculation that only a subset of third-party apps and services, notably those that give a direct alternative to the official Twitter client, such as Twitterrific and Tweetbot, have been affected. Other services that do not provide the full Twitter experience were said to be impacted.
Long before Musk took over the firm, Twitter had a love-hate relationship with third-party app suppliers.
On the one hand, they were critical to Twitter’s early success, giving features and options that Twitter itself did not provide by default. However, some have grown into big players in their own right, competing with official Twitter products.
The other unusual part is that Musk appears to have gone nuclear instead of improving the API architecture and possibly integrating Twitter adverts in the firehose stream so Twitter can make money. We don’t know whether he made the proper decision because he hasn’t mentioned anything about it. While suspicion over what occurred with Twitter’s API continues, Musk is preaching transparency on his own Twitter account.
