The future of the Twitter API

As mentioned at Mashable twitter have imposed a rate limit for their “whitelisted” users API calls. These are generally used by the kind of services that integrate with the public timeline, and/or provide unauthenticated calls upon the standard twitter API.

A lot of smaller external services use these to communicate with twitter to receive updates from your feed to display within their own environment. Larger, or rather, more established services with potential tie-ins to the big-G have seemingly already garnered priority feeds through twitters firehose API.

As I previously tweeted, it certainly feels like twitter are going to be generating revenue through the use of their “firehose” API. A currently closed service that is rumoured to be in use by some of the bigger players in the social media “extranet”, such as friendfeed. Could this spell the end of other minor twitter services - leaving the market for implementing peoples own private data in the realms of those with the cash to spare?

Whilst your data is knowingly made public by yourself as a user, what are you thoughts of a twitter becoming a walled garden, with gates for those with the cash to spare?

If it is simply a case of expense, my proposal would be to implement a different form of public API - or better yet, generate some revenue through methods that don’t involve separating the technical userbase into the haves and have-nots.

I for one have no problem with twitter implementing advertisements - if they are targeted effectively and/or relevant to what i’m tweeting about. Anything to keep an otherwise great service to keep operating the way it has, and not the direction it seems to be going in.

Twitter have already stated that they reserve the right to sell your information - maybe this is a step in that direction…