Twitter API Update

This morning we received an email to let us know our Twitter developer account had been suspended. To re-activate it we’d need to choose a free or basic account.

How We Use The Twitter API

We use our Twitter developer account to allow us to pull tweets into our DuoCMS websites. These are integrated designed elements of our websites, allowing our clients to share what they’re doing both on Twitter and within their web content (example opposite). Checking our clients websites we could see all the twitter content had broken.

What We Did

So we logged in, went past the scary red notices and clicked “Downgrade to Free”. All the tweets re-appeared, relief!

Will it Stay Fixed?

We then looked into the docs for the new API. Things didn’t look good. It appears our free tier is only “For write-only use cases and testing the Twitter API”, so wasn’t going to meet our needs. In addition to that the version of the API we use is 1.1, which they’ll switch off in a few days (normally changes like this are given many months, or sometimes years of notice).

The version of the API we’ll need to use going forward is version 2. We’ll also need to upgrade our API tier from free to basic. The Basic tier cost is $100 per month which is for 2 apps. To share this service between our sites we will need create a separate app which gets the latest tweets for all of our websites. This will require a reasonable amount of development work and require us to charge our clients something to help cover these unforeseen costs. All of this, with just a few days notice!

Alternatives

Twitter also offer a “widget” that can be dropped into a website. We typically avoid these kind of widgets because they often have a jarring contrast in style with the website and are a privacy concern, especially with GDPR and other privacy related regulations globally.

Outcome

With upgrade and ongoing costs, I honestly expect our clients to drop Twitter integration. These elements are a valuable tool, not just for our clients, but for Twitter too, as it help drive users to their platform. It’s a shame that an approachable, relatively simple to understand tool has been eroded in this way.

The notice period being so short we’ve been left to scramble to work out the impact and how best to update our websites to prevent issues across these sites. The simplest and most cost effective solution at the time of writing feels like just to remove these integrations.

Update: it’s now the 2nd of May 2023 and the api appears to be still working 2 days after it should have been switched off 🤷‍♂️

Update: it’s now the 23rd of May and the api appears to be still working 3 weeks after it should have been switched off 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

Update: 30th of June - pretty much all of our twitter integrations are now dead. 😢

Update: 10th of July - they’ve come back to life, just after Instragram launch threads 🤔

Update: 8th September - they died again some weeks ago, looks like it now permanent.