Twitter has been facing competition for relevancy in the broader social media market for a while now, even if it still remains one of the more popular sites for people to post random thoughts online. One of the core issues for Twitter is its inability to engage a lot of big businesses and monetise its services as well as its rivals, like Facebook.
Twitter is hoping to make it easier for organisations and companies to start building on its platform as it releases APIv2. This is the first complete rebuild of Twitter’s API since 2012, where the company started to restrict third-party development because it felt it was fragmenting its core user base. Something which was a controversial move at the time and remained a core reason why it never really took off as a platform for businesses.
What this new API does do though, is bring back things like conversation threading, poll results in Tweets, pinned Tweets on profiles, spam filtering, along with a far more powerful stream filtering and search query language. There will also be access to a real-time tweet stream, rather than forcing third parties to wait before serving new tweets. And this is simply what the API will be offering initially, as developers will be able to build a lot more functionality using the information provided and engage with Twitter more for other potential features.
Twitter is splitting API access along with three levels. Only the basic, free level is available now that has limits on the number of API calls developers can make (ping Twitter for data). The next level of access, which Twitter is calling “elevated,” won’t have the same restrictions, but will cost users, with pricing details no known just yet or exactly how they will differ. Lastly, there is a managed account level, where the company will look after everything for you for likely an even greater amount of money for you. The company does say, though, that it expects 80 percent of developers on its platform to have their needs met by the basic tier.
Earlier in the year, Twitter did reveal that it was working on a subscription model and this new API and its different features may be exactly what the company was alluding to, giving developers and companies the tools needed to better interact with their customers while still keeping the core platform free and open for everyone to use.
Last Updated: August 14, 2020
