![]() “I mean, literally you can have a lot of people losing their jobs because all these small companies that are relying on Twitter to afford the data for their app might fold if the pricing is too high,” said Carley.Īs for products like BotHunter, which help identify and characterize bots based on their behavior, being cut off from the API may make it harder to build the next generation of those services. Other companies using the enterprise API have remained independent. Over time, Twitter has purchased some of those products, such as TweetDeck, to officially expand its features. And there’s no guarantee that users will understand where to get the source data or follow an app to a new platform.Īnother victim could be small businesses that build apps that rely on Twitter’s developer API. Transitioning those bots to another platform, like Mastodon or Post, might be difficult. “If you know how government organizations work, you know it was a heavy lift to get these organizations permission to tweet stuff out and have bots that send out weather alerts and traffic and all these kinds of things,” said Nelson. There are also implications for bots that provide information on natural disasters and public safety - like those affiliated with or using data from federal or state government agencies tracking earthquakes, tsunamis and wildfires. If Twitter starts to charge, Old Dominion professors won’t be able to teach the same skills without finding a source of funding to pay for it. At Old Dominion, for example, computer science professors teach the Twitter API to undergraduate students, who then create bots that scan for content, look for mentions and other tasks. Nelson is most worried about how the Twitter’s API changes will affect research and education. She helped develop BotHunter, a bot detection system aimed at helping people identify harmful or deceptive bots. Twitter has several versions of its API, and it’s not clear which - whether the main developer API, or academic API or subsections of those - are being revoked, said Kathleen Carley, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems. One is just the confusion over exactly what is happening. By revoking free access, Twitter is essentially cutting off and breaking any app that isn’t profitable or doesn’t have the budget to pay. They power many of the third-party apps we like to use on platforms, adding features for users that platform owners don’t necessarily have time or interest in creating themselves. It’s a program on a machine outside Twitter talking to programs on Twitter’s servers, which send back machine-readable data that has been transformed into human-readable data.ĪPIs are common through the tech industry. And Twitter appears to be on the verge of killing the thing that it makes it special.” What an API does and why the revoking access mattersĪn API is essentially a machine-to-machine interface for getting data in and out of a system, according to Nelson. So all these people creating these special bots, these additional tools that extend the functionality, that’s what makes Twitter special. “They’re taking up space, they’re using our electricity, so we could charge them - but that’s not recognizing what makes your pub special, the fact you have live entertainment. “Imagine your neighborhood pub that has a stage and an open mic night, and they decided to charge a folk singer or band for them to come in and play in our pub,” said Michael Nelson, a professor of computer science at Old Dominion University. But the company’s announcement was light on details, leaving many confused. “We’ll be back with more details on what you can expect next week.”Ī developer on a Twitter developer forum said the costs could range from $99 to nearly $2,000, based on the number of monthly requests. We’re committed to enabling fast & comprehensive access so you can continue to build with us,” the official Twitter development account tweeted Thursday. “Twitter data are among the world’s most powerful data sets. ![]() For years, Twitter’s free basic access to its API (application programming interface) has allowed people to create endearing bots like Possum Every Hour and pursue more serious endeavors like collecting data to power academic research and activism around hate speech and disinformation. Twitter is shutting down free access to its API, the interface that allows third party apps to access Twitter, use its data and essentially talk to each other within a defined set of parameters. ![]()
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