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.”

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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.

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