
We got hit by a wave of deprecation on Twitter yesterday - davewiner
http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/october/unbreakingOurTwitter
======
sergiotapia
So you're crying foul because something marked as deprecated for quite some
time was taken offline? That's completely and entirely your own fault. Twitter
has done nothing wrong actually.

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benatkin
Yesterday I found that twitter wasn't working for my simplified posting
interface and example node.js application <https://justtweet.herokuapp.com/>
so I set out to fix it. The first thing I did was add logging of the error.
When I tried pushing it back to Heroku I found that something else broke,
because I didn't specify versions for my dependencies in my package.json and
it got newer versions with a slightly different API. When I got it working I
had refactored my code and changed the API url to https and to specify the
version number as 1.1. Thanks to Dave's work note I found out why:

> "All non-versioned API endpoints, such as
> <http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline>, will cease functioning."

[http://worknotes.scripting.com/october2012/101112ByDw/unbrea...](http://worknotes.scripting.com/october2012/101112ByDw/unbreakingOurTwitter)

Mine was api.twitter.com without a version, not twitter.com.

[https://github.com/resources/justtweet.herokuapp.com/commit/...](https://github.com/resources/justtweet.herokuapp.com/commit/100dda50a34a51455e6cad553e07a28e66723646#commitcomment-1981403)

I see why they felt the need to break twitter.com to simplify their deployment
but I don't see why they thought it made sense to break api.twitter.com urls
without a version number.

~~~
abraham
It isn't just deployment. Every version requires extra code paths for
developers to maintain.

~~~
benatkin
I didn't mean to say that it would be effortless. What I'm saying is that
having the API on twitter.com can complicate twitter's web app, which should
ideally be a separate service from their API. That might be a change worth
making, even if it caused problems for some API users. I don't think keeping a
non-versioned url at api.twitter.com would complicate things enough to justify
turning it off, unless they didn't care about small API users.

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kaolinite
Me too. Was just emailed by a client complaining that their Twitter feed had
gone down. I was using the JSON API too but needed to change from
<http://twitter.com/..>. to <http://api.twitter.com/1/..>.

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jeremysmyth
Dave, I really like RSS. I signed up to play with early functionality for
radio2 when you let folk do that, and I agree with everything you're saying
about twitter.

Why aren't you trying to replace it with the very decentralized thing you wish
for? The various tools you're creating are either clients for the existing
social networks, or aggregators/combiners/distributors -- none of which make
us (or you, actually) any less reliant on Twitter. The fact that you're as
vulnerable to Twitter's whims -- you, who's enmeshed in this world and
understands more about it than I'll ever hope to, and has created formats to
allow us to work apart from silos -- means I have no chance.

Is there something I'm not getting?

~~~
davewiner
Of course we're trying to replace it.

My feed is out there for anyone to follow.

<http://links.scripting.com/rss.xml>

What else can I do? The press doesn't want to write about this, presumably
because I'm not going to pay any money to sponsor their conferences.

I just don't have the power to get everyone to provide feeds, if I did, I
would.

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prodigal_erik
Did they _completely_ fail to notice the API was still in use, or just not
care? Thou shalt not break working code.

~~~
bonzoesc
The now-deprecated API probably wasn't working for Twitter, so they got rid of
it. Developers were warned before this happened, and your code is your
responsibility, not Twitter's.

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leeoniya
i could be wrong, but deprecation != removal (which is what this sounds like)

~~~
joekrill
It sounds like they had been previously deprecated. Which implies eventual
removal. The guy even says: "I admit I wasn't paying attention to their
deprecation".

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awestley
Better than a wave of defecation...

