Tag Archives: api

Coding

No sooner had I launched a demo version of Flamingo than I get an email from Twitter Platform Operations telling me to shut it down on the grounds that I was “resyndicating Twitter content” which is against their API terms of use.

The email was a rather anonymous message apparently sent from a customer service ticketing system of sorts. It was a casual threat of legal action, euphemised as follows:

“If changes have not been made to bring your service into compliance by [date] we will take steps to enforce our API Terms of Service. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.”

Continue reading…

Coding

All this recent Twitter API migration business has inspired me to build Flamingo – a hosted ajax service for your Twitter apps.

A lot of sites (particularly blogs) have Twitter feeds that are powered by JavaScript and based on the old API. A lot of these widgets will not be upgraded for various reasons and will soon stop working altogether. Many people don’t have the skills or resources to replace these widgets with the more advanced back end code that the new API requires. Flamingo helps front end developers by making it easy to configure and set up ajax services without knowing a server side language.

Continue reading…

Coding

1 Comment

On June 11th Twitter are permanently switching off off their old API leaving only the new one.

But nobody seems to be talking about it. (Except me. I can’t stop going on about it).

I suppose in the six months we’ve known about this, everybody who knew about the deadline has done something about it.

Putting these enlightened folk aside, it seems that a lot of site owners are blissfully unaware that (a) this is happening, and (b) that it affects them.

So, are you affected? Here’s how to decide ..

Continue reading…

Coding

Twitter pre-announced a new version for their API last night and developers are predictably miffed about it.

I’ve run TwitBlock for three years and have always known that one day it will stop working and I’ll have to take it offline. However, it’s not clear to me yet whether I’ll have to take it down in six months, so I’m trying to avoid a rant for once (mostly).

I just don’t think the impact is clear enough at this stage. Most points in the announcement are either too grey, or just confirm a general direction we were already well aware of.

By way of composing my own thoughts, this is my reaction to some points in the announcement:

Continue reading…

General

If you know about the Qwitter service, then you may also know what people say about it – that it plain doesn’t work. So for my first Twitter app, I decided to make one that does.

I have been made aware since then that there is also Twitdiff, although I haven’t tried it at time of writing.

If you don’t know about Qwitter, it’s a service that monitors your Twitter followers and emails you if someone unfollows you. My app currently tweets the notification instead, so everyone will know you’ve been qwit.

I’m not offering my app as a public service [yet] I knocked it up in 2 hours and if you know what you’re doing with a LAMP set-up you can download it and run it yourself.

» Download qwitter 0.1.2
Requires PHP >= 5.2.x  + json extension, MySQL >= 5.0.45

Continue reading…