My latest project, Best Of Tel Aviv, included some Twitter integration – a fancy slider that shows the latest tweets for chosen keywords, ‘Tel Aviv’ in our case I read the twitter search API like a good developer, looked at some examples, and lo and behold, here are the latest tweets!
A month down the line and suddenly my beautiful slider stopped working. Another client suddenly sent me an email – her premium theme twitter integration also stopped working. What happened? Why did the twitter search API die?
Several Google searches later I found out that Twitter changed their API completely. From now on API access works only via OAuth. This is annoying as hell. Without getting any notification, twitter broke the old behavior. They set me back several hours to figure out how to integrate with them now and fix the code.
I’m sure they have their reasons to introduce such a big API change. Heck, because they’re twitter, they just can, like Facebook can change its UI whenever they want. However, this aggressive behavior towards users and developers is starting to annoy me. Can we really be kicked around just because we get some services for free? Where did I sign for this?
If twitter were any kinder they would keep the old API and provide a new better, faster, more secure feature rich API to encourage people to use it. I have plenty of other integration Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. I guess I have to cross my fingers and pray to Shiva that they’ll treat us more kindly.