It’s been exactly one month since Twitter announced the 1.1 version of its APIs and the fact that some things were going to change for third-party developers. A lot of folks, including me, took that to mean that the stuff was about to hit the fan for anyone who has spent time building something cool on top of Twitter.
That really hasn’t happened, fortunately, save for a few situations like IFTTT, which I truly believe wasn’t Twitter’s fault at all. Other than that, things have been pretty quiet.
The deadline for apps and services to get their act together for the “Display Requirements” portion of the API changes was today, October 5th, as outlined by The Next Web. While the company hasn’t put up a new fancy page or blog post, the deadline is here. Some developers were surprised by this, as they thought that they had until March of next year to make these changes. The 1.1 stuff about API usage, yes…not display. Regardless, things have been sailing relatively smoothly, with appropriate changes being made by developers, best we can tell.
You see, at tech publications like ours, we get tips about all types of news. Not a day goes by where someone doesn’t write in to alert us about something they might seem as an injustice. Sometimes, they’re absolutely right, and we jump on it with a story and do the homework by reaching out the companies that are involved.
In Twitter’s case, specifically with the latest API changes, we’ve heard no horror stories about apps being bullied, shut down or otherwise cut off. That’s a good thing, because I was really worried about that, and a few other things that had been happening.
I’m not saying that everything is perfect with the way Twitter is ratcheting back its API usage, because well…I’ve never witnessed a company going from completely open to anything but that. Usually, a company that can’t scale just shuts down, and Twitter clearly isn’t shutting down.
Having said all of that, we do talk to developers and continue to, and haven’t heard any situations to think that these deadlines or changes are affecting anything. If you’ve heard otherwise, hit us up on the tip line. So far, nobody has “died”, nobody has been “cut off” and all is tweeting along.
We reached out to Twitter regarding details on how they’d handle these things and so far we haven’t heard back. We assume that flying monkeys won’t be attacking developers anytime soon.
It’s D-Day, and there’s nothing to see here folks…please move along.
[Monkey credit: Flickr]