
New Twitter API Drops Support for RSS, Puts Limits on Third-Party Clients - mmahemoff
http://mashable.com/2012/09/05/twitter-api-rss/
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misnome
Edit: I stand corrected. Apparently, a lot of people do use RSS twitter for
various reasons. Presumably the resyndication clause is targeted to prevent
people re-creating RSS feeds that they are using from the API, though I have
no idea why.

I'm not one of the RSS doom-predictors, as I find it very useful to keep up to
date with blogs/etc that don't update very often and aren't enough on my radar
to check frequently. Saying that, who on earth was using RSS to keep track of
twitter? I can't imagine it was at all efficient, or easier than the API.

The other change that seems to be listed here:

> _“Don’t resyndicate data. If your service consumes Twitter data, don’t take
> that data and expose it via an API, post it to other cloud services, and so
> on.”_

has several possible conclusions listed, which I don't think are warranted.
This looks like it's to squash any possibility of people getting around the
user client limit by aggregating updates, before it happens. That said, vague
hand waving seems to have been a large part of a lot of the recent twitter
announcements.

~~~
mmahemoff
It would be very strange indeed if someone had added a gaggle of Twitter RSS
feeds to their daily Google Reader consumption.

But RSS is as much a tool for developers to syndicate content as it is for
end-users their subscriptions. It's an open standard that thousands of
libraries and services know how to hook into.

e.g. Even if Yahoo! Pipes or IFTTT didn't know anything about Twitter's API,
you could still mash it up using RSS. Or if you're trying to write a client to
stream Twitter in a language where there's no Twitter library, you can resort
to a generic RSS library.

~~~
CrazedGeek
I (and a few others I know) actually have a few Twitter feeds in Google
Reader. It only takes a second to skim through them, and the ability to only
see unread items is nice. No Twitter client that I've tried has done that, so
RSS clients were the next best thing. Ah well.

~~~
hboon
SimplyTweet for iOS has support for fetching as many tweets as possible.

Disclaimer: I built it.

------
debacle
Limiting third-party clients is kind of okay.

But dropping RSS? Really? In what universe does that even make sense?

~~~
danudey
I would be shocked if any significant number of people actually used the RSS
feed for anything. I, for one, don't want an entry in my feed reader
consisting of a stream of one-line messages. Seems utterly pointless.

~~~
ojiikun
The RSS feeds are an awesome feature if you want to follow high-volume, public
feeds without cluttering up your twitter feed itself.

I follow several dozen close friends, and like to keep my twitter client free
of noise from anyone else so I can get real-time info about what my people are
up to. Thus, I follow about another 20 celebrities, bloggers, &c. in my RSS
reader where time-criticality isn't an issue.

If they remove RSS feeds, there will be a screen-scraper in my futre, I fear.
:(

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nhebb
Even though the slow leak of these stories in the tech press is not good PR,
Twitter has mind share, so it may not matter. Celebrities, journalists, and
typical tweetoholics probably don't care.

~~~
nvk
I agree with you, until their clients start to break.

~~~
danudey
Stats have shown that the vast majority of people use the web interface, the
mobile web interface, and Twitter's own clients (in that order). After that
comes third-party clients in a small slice of the pie.

Also, non-end-user clients (e.g. Hootsuite) won't get shut out because they
provide value above and beyond 'list of tweets', and Tweetdeck is owned by
Twitter now so they're going to be fine too.

Twitter could turn off all third-party clients tomorrow and the vast majority
of Twitter users wouldn't notice anything (until the minority started
complaining loudly). Even then, most people would probably think 'Well, just
use one that works then.'

~~~
nvk
I think most of the heavy users/contributors probably use a client.

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g_nittner
But they're still not providing user email address in authentication response.
Don't understand that approach.

~~~
r4vik
this is why I always sign in with twitter over facebook. No spam

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nvk
In short, App.net has been given another gift.

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unkoman
Fuck.

