My company uses the Twitter API pretty heavily in our product, and it offers a pretty good value add for shared users. After the initial shutoff announcement we reached out to them and they maintained they there were no exceptions to the rule, and we'd have to pay them for access starting in 6 days. Doubly weird because they couldn't tell us what the pricing plan even was because they themselves hadn't figured it out yet.
We thought, whatever, we can live without the Twitter API. Then they gave us a one week extension while they negotiated a contract (we didn't want to negotiate anything), and then another extension. We simply said no both times, and prepared to proactively shut down our API use. Now it seems they have delayed it even further.
Reading between the lines, I'd say they expected that every company would roll over and start giving them millions of dollars with no notice for continued API use, and that didn't pan out like they thought.
Lots and lots of the services such as mine have no revenue to pay with, never mind the dev time to go chasing wild geese!
In fact, I wonder if some people turned their services off preemptively, to avoid filling their logs with errors. I wrote a tweet kill switch into my code, to strip out all the support cleanly. I was tempted to throw it, but waited.
I joined Twitter in 2009 to make use of the ability to share some info automatically, aka a good "bot".
I will have little use for Twitter if/when this free API is canned. (And no, no one pays me for the info.)
I have moved my attention to Mastodon...
Given how fragile and ugly connecting to Twitter was (cf dead simple for Mastodon) and how capricious Musk is, a new different API, even if free, seems not worth investing time in.
> Given how fragile and ugly connecting to Twitter was (cf dead simple for Mastodon)
I am enjoying this aspect, especially since I"m running my own instances, where I can just slap up any bot I want in about 5 minutes. Or connect HomeAssistant to alert me to changes, etc.
I'm not sure if it's only me but the timelines have become useless the past couple of days
The "following" has been showing some 20% of the tweets it used to show. The "for you" tab seems to be repeating itself and/or not giving what I want to see
Cthulhu help me if I ever feel the need to follow somebody's crazy whims to feel like "a real developer"
We thought, whatever, we can live without the Twitter API. Then they gave us a one week extension while they negotiated a contract (we didn't want to negotiate anything), and then another extension. We simply said no both times, and prepared to proactively shut down our API use. Now it seems they have delayed it even further.
Reading between the lines, I'd say they expected that every company would roll over and start giving them millions of dollars with no notice for continued API use, and that didn't pan out like they thought.