
Premium Account Activity API - fniephaus
https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/accounts-and-users/account-activity-api.html
======
ranman
More details here:
[https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/e...](https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/enabling-
all-developers-to-build-on-the-account-activity-api.html)

>”Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message endpoints, originally
slated for retirement on June 19th 2018, will be deprecated on Wednesday
August 16, 2018 which provides 3 months from today’s release of the Account
Activity API for migration.”

This is a huge “fuck you developers” from Twitter. They should have offered a
year from the GA date to port applications. They should be sending emails to
all applications using streaming APIs.

I like the webhook model, I think it’s great. I think the beta they had was
effectively useless - for instance, the Docs were (still are?) entirely
incorrect and basically told you completely wrong information with copy/paste
errors everywhere. 0 QA. [https://twittercommunity.com/t/account-activity-api-
all-acti...](https://twittercommunity.com/t/account-activity-api-all-
activities-beta-whitelist-failure/99652/12) you couldn’t register more than
one webhook and were locked into a “env-beta” URL. Again, the Docs were wrong
here.

I haven’t had a chance to review this since GA but I will now. I’m not hopeful
that it’s any better given the track record of Twitter to deliver. If they did
knock it out of the park I’ll be the first to praise them... but 3 months is
still not enough time.

~~~
ihuman
They announced the deprecation date back in December.

[https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/a...](https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/announcing-
more-functionality-to-improve-customer-engagements-on-twitter.html)

~~~
Savageman
Yet they didn't give access to replacements until today.

------
ArmandGrillet
What should we do?

Twitter offered a base service that was great and they are now constantly
removing features (no chronological timeline, no access to polls for 3rd party
apps, now no streaming for 3rd party apps). A few days ago on HN we were
talking about Mastodon but I don't see it replacing a Twitter as it's a
platform, not a single entity that I can use.

The best scenario I can imagine would be to see the teams behind Twitterific
and Tweetbot creating a Mastodon server and offering me to switch in the app
in the coming months. Twitter is screwing us because we are, as users of those
apps, the 1%. And I'm quite sure that the people I follow are also part of the
same single percent.

To The Iconfactory and Tapbots: make me pay again, ask me to pay a
subscription, I don't care. But screw Twitter, they treat you (and thus us)
like garbage, make me switch to something offering me a better experience and
that is guaranteed to last. Is posting tweets from my account through your
apps still free? Then offer me the possibility to send tweets when I send
messages on your new platform + a weekly message to send to my few followers
that they should also switch.

Twitter is gonna apparently kill you at some point anyway, letting your users
see a stream ordered by a shitty IA and with 1/3 of ads. So please, let's
fight instead of slowly dying.

~~~
sp332
There's still an option for a chronological timeline.
[https://twitter.com/settings/account#personalize_timeline](https://twitter.com/settings/account#personalize_timeline)
and uncheck "Show best tweets first". It will still inject a block called "In
case you missed it" from time to time but you can dismiss it.

 _Mastodon... it 's a platform, not a single entity that I can use._

That might be the tradeoff that has to be made. Pick a Mastodon instance whose
administration you trust not to screw you over. If they do you can move to
another. If you go with a single entity, you're going to be stuck when they
mess with you. Like with Twitter.

~~~
Mindwipe
Well, it goes you a chronological ish timeline. It still insists on trying to
insert blocks of "content you might have missed", and it still has crappy
conversation views that can't be turned off.

A strictly chronological timeline is only available via third party apps.

~~~
WorldMaker
Plus "Promoted Tweets". Those are also out of order, and increasingly just as
irritating as the "content you might have missed" blocks.

Also, now the "content you might have missed" stuff is showing up in
Notifications and whoever thought that was a good idea?

------
Someone1234
This might not be an area people want to discuss, but at this price does it
make a grey market API competitor viable? Meaning first party API access is
seen as preferable because HTML scraping is unreliable and therefore
necessitates a full time staff of individuals to respond to site changes.

But if the price is high enough, couldn't a third party operating out of
another part of the world undercut them using scraping, a dedicated team, and
a clean API? Twitter may have technical remedies but it is unlikely they'd
have legal ones outside of the US and a few Western countries.

Official APIs Vs. "pirate" APIs haven't really been a major issue until now
because companies simply weren't charging enough to make the alternative cost
effective. Is that going to change with pricing strategies like this one?

~~~
WaxProlix
These sorts of 'grey market' APIs already have a lot of infrastructure support
too. Paid APIs haven't been the push, but people have wanted programmatic
access to other peoples' site data for a while now. The real driver has just
been "no API", not "pricey API".

~~~
vinceguidry
Is there an industry term for non-official APIs? I often find myself wondering
if a third-party service already exists around some aspect of a platform's
"crown jewels", but don't really know how to search for them.

~~~
WaxProlix
Not that I know of, I just know that there's an ecosystem of bespoke site
wrappers that people will pay for, and some folks who are quite good at it.
Kind of grey hat stuff and it's been a few years since I was in contact with
the scene, if you could call it that.

~~~
StudentStuff
Downloading a webpage and returning a snippet of it via API isn't greyhat
work, just like building a search engine isn't greyhat work. Processing public
websites is white hat work, and very common too! If a business wants to
restrict access, they can take down their website.

~~~
vinceguidry
Any company that has anything valuable that anyone else would want is going to
put TOS there prohibiting scraping, making it grey hat and legally risky.

------
ProfessorLayton
It looks like this is going to hit clients like Twitterific/Tweetbot pretty
hard
[https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996784838349910016](https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996784838349910016)

It's sad to see how Twitter is treating 3rd party devs, and "engaged" users —
the kind of users willing to buy a 3rd party app to use their services.
Furthermore, these engaged users bring their value to the platform by bringing
in eyeballs from less engaged audiences rather than clicking on ads
themselves.

~~~
Boulth
For Twitter third party clients are basically competition so it's not
surprising that they make API access as limited as possible. Furthermore
because of network effects they are not afraid that a significant number of
people will leave the platform.

~~~
ymolodtsov
Well, they could try to compete and make decent apps first.

------
mrguyorama
I have no baseline to go by, but my gut feel is that the price is quite high.
If it isn't, that means my data is worth $12 a month. Think of how many
services are scraping/selling/aggregating/whatever-ing your data. Each one
aught to be paying you the equivalent of $12 a month, either in straight cash
for something you pay for, or in services.

I know I'm not getting my value.

------
STRiDEX
I think the context on this is [http://apps-of-a-feather.com/](http://apps-of-
a-feather.com/) on the recent changes to their api for app developers.

------
biznickman
Years ago they raised the minimum API entry pricing. I used to pay for Topsy
and they gave aggregate data that was quite insightful and reasonably priced.

Soon after Apple's acquisition they (1) jacked up the price, and then (2) shut
it down soon after.

The reality is that Twitter doesn't have the resources allocated to manage
tiny customers and doesn't desire to. That decision was made years ago. They
can give an employee 10 customers to manage each of whom spend $36,000 a year
and likely will increase and the math adds up.

Is anybody really shocked by this pricing?

~~~
manigandham
Yes, because the platform is a worldwide social network, not a B2B app. Also
what is there to manage? There's no need for the vast majority of app
developers to talk to anyone to use an API.

~~~
StudentStuff
OP has a legacy mindset, essentially the only time I talk to a company about
their API is when it returns bad data, or is non-functional. Outside of that,
I might interact with an account manager at onboarding (due to some companies
forcing you to deal with one), and if the API is heavily used, I may reach out
and ask 'em if they can go cheaper, while shopping around with other companies
offering APIs for said purpose.

------
nevi-me
I have a Twitter account that retweets a specific # from followers (who submit
crowdsourced train updates). Would these count as 1 subscription, or how does
the subscription counting work?

On the same account, I have some very basic chatbot thingy where you can ask
"where is train 1234?" and get a response. It works by listening to the User
Stream, and using regex to check if the "bot" is being asked a question.

> When we announced our plans to retire and replace Site Streams, User
> Streams, and our REST Direct Message endpoints, we did so as part of our
> efforts to improve the developer experience and provide a sustainable way to
> help businesses engage with those looking to connect with them.

Streams were pretty suitable for my use-case, so I don't believe Twitter on
this sentence.

Their changes seem like they just want a way to get non-firehose users to pay
for accessing data streams, and might alienate some developers. Someone else
mentioned the short timeline over which to migrate (for devs that only get
access from today).

Dear Twitter, you've had a bad run with alienating developers in the past;
please decide what you want to do. If we build our communities around your
platform, be more clear about what we have to now pay for.

------
kevin_b_er
All I need to know is which 3rd party provider will give me a linear timeline,
even if I have to pay a little. Twitter refuses to stop "curating" my feed on
their website, so clearly I need to rely on a 3rd party. Facebook has long
since become utterly useless due to feed curation.

~~~
ymolodtsov
The founders of thirt party apps already think it won’t be financially viable
for them and their users.

------
dkersten
I think its important to qualify “users” in this case. Technically, its 250
_subscriptions_ , whether or not theres a one to one mapping between
subscription and user depends on the use case, although for a an app where
each user requires their own unique stream, this is likely the case.

------
kylehotchkiss
Seems to be how Twitter is accommodating for twitter clients not showing ads.
That's like $11 a month for the 250 users but I imagine that the enterprise
could get as low as $5/user/month.

It's almost like the ad-free experience people want on social networks would
be possible with this. I'm hoping they work with Tweetbot and this isn't a
passive aggressive way to shut it down.

------
mattbillenstein
This I think is their enterprise data service as powered by a company they
acquired awhile back -- I mean, for me if I were running a business an
enterprise customer is at least this amount of money per month or otherwise
why bother with them at all. Not sure what the big deal is.

------
caiob
I’m just going to sit and wait until Twitter falls into the irrelevancy black
hole.

~~~
isaiahg
They very nearly did until Trump came into power. Remember all the articles
talking about the troubles twitter was having and everyone predicting the end.
And then the campaign happened. Now everyone has twitter just to see what
he'll say next.

------
jitl
So, this is what they’re going to ask Tweetbot and the rest of the alternative
Twitter clients to switch to?

~~~
kylehotchkiss
It seems like they're waiting for enterprise pricing:
[https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/15/tweetbot-3-arrives-
with-a-...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/15/tweetbot-3-arrives-with-a-new-
look-and-a-reprieve-from-twitters-api-changes/)

I'd pay $10/month for Tweetbot. It is an ad-free twitter experience after all.

~~~
guptaneil
Well Tweetbot will be paying Twitter $11/mo. For them to also make some money,
they have to charge you closer to $20/mo.

~~~
jonknee
Tweetbot will not pay that, they'll poll instead of stream and have a worse
product because of it.

~~~
kylehotchkiss
Tweetbot with poll still beats Twitter.com with streaming.

------
BillinghamJ
That is absolute insanity...

~~~
bkovacev
At the very minimum.

------
dusing
Anything for monitoring tweets with hashtags?

