In the beginning you could post a tweet just by doing a http basic-authenticated post containing the tweet body, and there were unauthenticated rss feeds for most data feeds. These days you have to create app ids, tokens, etc etc etc. It really was a lot more open earlier.
Twitter was part of the reason I fell in love with development. The easy interaction with the whole platform changed my view on data. It broke my heart when they introduced v2
