Twitter Makes API V2 Official ⇥ blog.twitter.com

Amir Shevat and Sonya Penn of Twitter:

With today’s updates, the Twitter API v2 is now officially the primary Twitter API. Over the past several months, we’ve shipped lots of new features and endpoints to the API v2 that weren’t previously available on v1.1, including endpoints for Spaces, posting polls in Tweets, and pinning and unpinning Lists (see a full list here). You can follow our product roadmap for a list of v2 endpoints in development and view our mapping of v1.1 to v2 endpoints.

Dan Brunsdon of Twitter:

Specifically, we’ve removed terms that restricted replication of the Twitter experience, including Twitter’s core features as well as terms that required permission to have high numbers of user tokens.

We know that building solutions that help people on Twitter often means a developer has to build (or replicate) some of the things that are available on Twitter. These changes to our Developer Policy are intended to drive clarity for the developer ecosystem and provide an open API platform that makes it easier for developers to build, innovate, and make an impact on the public conversation.

Perhaps this really is Twitter’s attempt to reignite a community of third-party clients. I hope so. There were dozens of clients ten years ago (via Elle) that offered better versions of the Twitter timeline as well as those that provided a more focused experience. But that feels a bit like history now in large part because of changes made in 2012.

This week’s announcement appears to be Twitter’s mea culpa, but developers are right to be cautious. A third-party client cannot search tweets older than one week, view likes or retweets with comments, use bookmarks, or vote in polls — among many other limitations. Some of these things are on Twitter’s roadmap for API V2, but it is unclear whether all of them will come to fruition. One thing seems certain: we are not going back to the days when users’ posts were available as an RSS feed.