Twitter API/Developer Meetup Notes

Here are some notes I took during the Twitter developer meetup that was tonight, at Twitter Headquarters. They’re probably not complete, because I only took bits and pieces on my iPhone, then filled out some details when I got home. It does sound like Twitter are really trying to bulk up their efforts to support developers and let their community flourish, which is probably a great approach given their “we are a platform” strategy. Taken/formatted via ListML, thus the very-hierarchical list approach. Enjoy.

  1. Focusing API efforts on 3 main areas
    1. Reliability
    2. Developer Happiness
    3. Utility
  2. New internal “Developer Advocate” (Taylor)
  3. When can we access past 3000 tweets??
    1. big focus, working on it
  4. http://dev.twitter.com
    1. Developer portal
    2. API Blog to be revived
    3. Better docs, etc
  5. HTTP Basic going away in June
    1. xAuth to exchange user/pass for OAuth token
      1. Only for non-web apps
    2. Everyone else use OAuth
  6. Signup API
    1. Might be exposed
    2. Available to very limited partners
    3. More of a policy decision
  7. api@twitter.com
    1. Email for access to xAuth/any other biz-dev type things related to API
  8. OAuth Echo
    1. Delegated OAuth access
    2. Will be available before HTTP Basic is deprecated
    3. Allows you to “pass authentication around”
  9. Inefficient to retweet counts
    1. Adding “object counts” to a lot of objects
      1. Retweets
      2. List membership
  10. Streaming API replaces XMPP
    1. XMPP never coming back
      1. It doesn’t scale for one to many(?)
    2. Firehose = 100%
    3. Gardenhose = 15%
    4. Spritzer = 5%
  11. HTML5 geo tags will be supported
  12. Quarterly meetups similar to this
    1. Roadmap
    2. Upcoming
    3. Community developments
  13. Username to email resolving API?
    1. Used to be available
    2. Spammer’s heaven
    3. Looking at ways to expose something similar, without being spammable
    4. Address Book API coming soon
  14. Commercial Licensing (data) is be part of their revenue model
  15. Favorites system highish prio to be “improved”
    1. Favorite?
    2. +1?
    3. Like?
    4. Bookmark?
  16. New Big Data store
    1. Cassandra
    2. Spearheaded by Ryan King
  17. Analytics on API usage etc
    1. Will start posting to blog
    2. They are trying to collect more internally
  18. Twitter is hiring
    1. Pretty much everywhere