In addition, Twitter makes it clear that any apps that rely on the older Site Streams and User Streams APIs, will have to live without that functionality after August 16th. It claims this won't affect most apps – only a small percentage.
"As a few developers have noticed, there's no streaming connection capability or home timeline data, which are only used by a small amount of developers (roughly 1% of monthly active apps)," writes Twitter Senior Product Manager, Kyle Weiss, in a blog post. "As we retire aging APIs, we have no plans to add these capabilities to Account Activity API or create a new streaming service for related use cases."
Boom.
Well, at least the announcement addresses
developers' complaints about a lack of information from Twitter regarding the pricing of the new APIs, and how long before all the changes kick in, given the news of a delay.
As Favstar's creator Tim Haines explained when announcing the app's shutdown, the lack of information made running its business too difficult.
""Twitter… [has] not been forthcoming with the details or pricing. Favstar can't continue to operate in this environment of uncertainty,"
he told TechCrunch earlier this week.
As for those 1 percent of apps that use the soon-to-be-depracated APIs –
like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings or Twitterific – the plan was to switch over to the Enterprise Account Activity API. But they were frustrated that Twitter wasn't saying how much it would cost; so they didn't know if it would be an affordable option to sustain their business. It looks like they'll now get those details.
But as those developers
pointed out recently, there were broader concerns that the API changes were meant to actively discourage "client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream consumer client experience,"
as Twitter had once said. Unfortunately for end users, the company's decision is especially frustrating, given that Twitter
shut down its native Mac app.
It does appear that Twitter is looking to impact the functionality of these "1 percent" of apps, given that it will no longer let them stream in tweets as they're posted (it's making the
statuses/home_timelineendpoint available instead – which is not streaming). And other notifications will be delayed by a couple of minutes, in some cases, as Tweetbot's creator, Paul Haddad,
explained yesterday.
