Yesterday, Twitter launched its API v2, which makes it easier for businesses, academics, and third-party developers to build on its platform. For background, the company announced the new API last month, but as the news arrived the day after it was hit by one of the most devastating hacks in social media history, so Twitter decided to delay the launch.
With v2, Twitter is presenting not only as a way to deliver new features faster, but also something of a reset in its long and fractious relationship with the app’s developer community. The API v2 is the first complete rebuild of Twitter’s API since 2012, when the company famously began limiting how third-party developers could build on its product. Prior to this, outside developers could more or less replicate and customize the Twitter experience in their own clients. The API v2 offers third-party developers access to features long absent from their clients, including “conversation threading, poll results in Tweets, pinned Tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language.” There’s also access to a real-time tweet stream, rather than forcing third parties to wait before serving new tweets. You can read more here.
