Twitter has announced an update that will significantly improve the experience within the third-party social media platform's apps.
And the update gives developers much greater access to their reverse schedule. This update to the recently launched version 2 of the API is a new step in the company's journey to better support developers.
Developers use the second version of the API to get data from Twitter. As the company notes in the announcement blog, the new API version 2 feature gives developers a way to retrieve the latest Tweets and retweets posted by the authenticated user and the accounts they follow.
In other words, the developer can request to see the data Twitter shows you when you open the platform's official app with the most recent tweets option selected, so that their app can show them to you instead.
And for third-party customers like Tweetbot, the feature is most welcome. “The old way to get the user’s timeline is one of our most used API calls,” said Paul Haddad, one of the developers of Tweetbot.
The old version of the API was launched in 2012. As a result, it became outdated, and developers using it faced more restrictions when trying to get the user's timeline.
Haddad explained that the change makes Tweetbot more responsive to users. “We are able to update the timeline more often and allow users to scroll back a lot in the timeline, because the second version of the API allows developers to make more requests in a number of ways,” he said.
Twitter gives developers better access
The old version of the API, version 1.1, allows you to request the schedule 15 times in a 15-minute window. It can return up to 800 tweets.
The second version of the API supports up to 180 requests per user within 15 minutes. It recovers 3,200 tweets.
From his perspective as a developer, Haddad points out that the update simplifies things. "We are currently using version 1.1 of the API to get a list of tweets," he said. While we use the second version of the API to fill in any specific data (surveys, cards, metrics, etc.). And with this new version of the second version of the API, we can get all that data in one step.
During the release of the second version of the API, the company indicated that it is trying to make adjustments with developers. This came after years of making new features exclusive to its official app.
The company removed the restrictions from its terms of service. These restrictions made it difficult for third-party apps to compete with the official app, such as restrictions on the number of users.
With the update, the company appears to be showing that it is continuing the trend of giving developers access to important features. It's notable, Haddad says, that Twitter built and released the second version of the Timeline API.