After a bit of a hubbub among developers this morning who were pissed that in a few months their third-party Twitter apps could lose essential functionality, Twitter announced that they would be delaying the sunset of certain APIs in an effort to ensure developers had enough time to migrate to new systems.
The current date the APIs were set to retire was June 19, and developers of apps like Twitterrific, Tweetbot and Tweetings were getting understandably antsy because third-party devs hadn’t been granted access to the new Account Activity API that Twitter announced last year.
No details on how long this delay will last, though a Twitter spokesperson tells TechCrunch that today’s announcement was meant to ensure devs have enough time to migrate to the new API.
Third party Twitter services have always been in a weird position with the company, because as Twitter has grown they’ve surprisingly continued to be pretty generous with what devs can do with their APIs. Instead of cutting these apps out, they’ve just proceeded to rein things in slowly, so when something like an API shutdown is coming along, these developers might feel like this is the time where they have to gear up to fight the good fight against Big Twitter.
Today’s news is good for these third-party developers but it’s only useful if they get more of the questions answered by Twitter in terms of what functionality they can expect to maintain and how much the new pricing for Enterprise service to the company’s accounts will be.
