Twitter published an upgrade on Friday that should dramatically enhance the experience inside third-party Twitter apps: it gives developers far greater access to Twitter’s reverse-chronological timeline. This update to Twitter’s newly released API v2, the developer interface for obtaining data from Twitter, is a big step forward in Twitter’s attempts to better serve developers.”Get the most recent Tweets and Retweets posted by the authorized user and the accounts they follow,” according to the new API v2 functionality. To put it another way, a developer can ask for access to the data that Twitter displays when you open the first-party app and pick the “Latest Tweets” option so that their app can display it.
The capability (or “endpoint” in developer speak) is especially useful for third-party clients like Tweetbot. According to Twitter’s statement, one of Tweetbot’s engineers, Paul Haddad, said that the previous method of getting a user’s timeline “is one of our most utilized API requests.” The final version of the API was released in 2012, thus it was long beyond its prime — and developers wanting to get a user’s timeline encountered additional limits.
Tweetbot will now be more attentive to users, according to Haddad. Because API v2 allows developers to make more queries in a few ways, “we’ll simply be able to refresh the timeline more regularly and allow consumers to browse much further back in their timeline.” API v1.1 allows you to request the home timeline 15 times in a 15-minute span and receive up to 800 tweets. In the same timeframe, API v2 enables up to 180 queries per user and retrieves 3,200 tweets. It simplifies things a lot from a development viewpoint, he claims.”At the moment, we use the v1.1 home timeline API to get a list of Tweets, then the v2 APIs to fill up any v2 specific data” (polls, cards, metrics, etc.). We can now acquire all of the data in one step using the new v2 version.”
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