Twitter cuts off access for popular third party clients
Starting on Thursday night, Twitter cut off API access for some of the biggest third party clients.
It’s hard to tell whether the third-party client outage is due to the API. Attempting certain calls from my individual Twitter developer account seemed to work, while Twitter’s own API explorer tool is currently broken.
It definitely seems like it is on purpose. For it to last this long without any update definitely makes it feel like it was done on purpose. Many developers' apps have started showing up as "suspended". In looking at my own account, I can see that both Tweetbot and Fenix are gone from my list of connected apps.
The Icon Factory (makers of Twitteriffic) have a blog post about it as well.
The complete silence from Twitter is completely baffling. Burning more than a decade of working with developers overnight seems incredibly stupid. As Paul Hadad, one of the makers of Tweetbot said:
Even during the darkest Twitter 1.0 days they were pretty open about what they were doing. I remember getting a call prior to the 4 quadrants token limit where they explained what was going to happen and answered questions. I wasn't happy but at least felt there was respect.
Updated info, all third party apps effectively banned: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/19/23562947/twitter-third-party-client-tweetbot-twitterific-ban-rules
Man, imagine your business going under overnight because someone decided you weren't worth working with...
Also, the way every article casts shade on Twitter continues to amuse me:
Not related to this post but one thing I'll always remember the Twitter 1.0 for is open sourcing twitter bootstrap. If you're a web developer or know even a little bit about programming, you'll realize how big a contribution this is. For a large company like Twitter, a CSS framework seems like a small deal but for millions of small freelancers (like myself), Bootstrap is a source of livelihood.
I wish more and more corporations start open sourcing their software too. It's a win-win as they gain a huge amount of society goodwill, and the plebs get to use extraordinary software without selling their farms.
I understand Twitter is a private company and can do whatever they want, but how much would it lose by giving just a little heads-up?
That's an actual question that I'm posing. Does anyone know the math? How much would they lose by giving a 60-day or at least 30-day notice?
$1,500,000 a day?
It's impossible to say from the outside how much of twitter's hosting bill goes on API servicing but given their infrastructure costs are vast it's probably quite a lot.
Then again, $45 million (30 days notice at $1.5m a day) is basically a rounding error on an estimated debt of $13bn. Musk isn't going to make Twitter profitable by making tiny cuts like this.
Seems like that attitude can cost a lot more than 45mi in the long run, no? He's burning a lot of bridges with this disrespect. If I understand correctly, some companies can cease to exist due to that decision. Harsh.
I don't think anyone other than Elmo himself and his most delusional cronies has any doubt that this is a massively stupid decision that will destroy orders of magnitude more value in the long run than it could ever plausibly save.
Companies can't just do whatever they want. Maybe they can do this one thing, I don't know. But they definitely cannot just do whatever they want.
Yes, you're absolutely right. I was not being literal.
Fritter (https://fritter.cc/) still seems to be operational. That may change, or it's using a different API hook.
https://nitter.net/ seems to still be working as well.