[picodguyo]

This is what they cite as the key benefits:

"A cleaner API that's easier to use, with new developer features like the ability to specify which fields get returned, or retrieve more Tweets from a conversation within the same response

Some of the most requested features that were missing from the API, including conversation threading, poll results in Tweets, pinned Tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language "

I really doubt this is what developers have been yearning for in a revamped Twitter API. Previous APIs provided plenty of functionality, it's just that too many of us were burned by the ever-shifting policies around API use. I personally went from envisioning Twitter as the social data pipeline of the web to vowing never to touch it again within the span of one year. I can't believe this announcement wouldn't touch on policy and developer relations at all.

[Nav_Panel]

> conversation threading

Actually, this was a major point of API failure when I last tried to use it. Did you know that, with the current API, there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet? This makes it impossible to build tools that, say, allow you to visualize a tweet thread, because you simply can't fetch the thread.

So I'll say that, as a casual, social, and informational user of Twitter (i.e. not business, not adtech, not academia), this announcement gives me a little hope that we might see a resurgence in 3rd party apps that provide more powerful ways of interfacing with Twitter. At least, that's my hope, maybe I'm naive that they'd really allow this.

[blueline]

> This makes it impossible to build tools that, say, allow you to visualize a tweet thread

it is possible -- it unfortunately happens to be part of my job description to do so

one of the sibling comments basically has it right. you can build it from the bottom up (where "bottom" is the deepest tweet in the thread you know about, one way or another).

let me tell you though, i am _very_ excited for this new API, because there is some absolutely horrible code i will be able to delete as a result of it

[Nav_Panel]

Is your work open source/viewable anywhere? I've written a few (probably ToS violating) plugins for Twitter myself, and would be curious to see.

[blueline]

unfortunately not, but luckily with this new api it shouldn't matter for too much longer :-)

[jccalhoun]

Conversation threading is huge. I've had to use a few tools that keep getting broke to try to manually capture replies and threads to tweets for academic use. (https://www.exquisitetweets.com/ and https://treeverse.app/ which seems broken now)If a tool comes out that can do this easily (I'm no programmer so command line stuff if a little beyond me) then I will be very happy.

[toyg]

> there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet

My crusty old version of Tweetbot has been doing that for years...? Maybe not perfectly for tweets with hundreds of replies, but well enough.

[jdminhbg]

I'm not sure which hack Tweetbot is using to do this (I think search as noted below), but you can tell it's a hack because it only works for recent-ish tweets. If you go to a tweet a couple weeks old and view details, you can see that it won't fill in the replies.

[jeromegv]

Can confirm, Tweetbot never has "all" the replies.

[roberto]

The way clients usually do this is by fetching all mentions to the user after a given timestamp (of the original tweet), and collecting only those that are replies to the tweet. Since there's a limit on how many mentions you can get, you might not get all the replies.

It's been like that at least since 2013.

[Nav_Panel]

Any idea how it's done in the API? I know you can retrieve a tweet's parent, but not its children.

[anaphor]

You have to use the search feature to look for tweets and then look at the parent tweet ID. This is what bots like threadreaderapp, etc do. You can construct it from the bottom up if you know the ID of the last tweet in the thread of responses too, but you wouldn't know that a priori unless the user gives it to your software somehow.

[Nav_Panel]

But... that's not a tree -- there's still no way to discover all leaves. That's just a thread/singly linked list.

[anaphor]

Yes, I forgot to mention that. You need to know the IDs of all the leaf nodes of the thread or else you can only partially reconstruct it.

[abluecloud]

so the api is literally backwards

[wyldfire]

Step 0: build a tree including all tweets,

...

;)

[benmanns]

Possibly using the HTML API.

[not_really]

The final frontier

[bad_user]

Speak for yourself. Their current API makes third party clients very difficult because they lack features and I hoped they'll announce something like this.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind them touching on the developers relations they want to build, but no company of their size will admit to wrongdoing in the past.

Also words aren't worth anything unless they come in a legally binding contract that can't change on a whim.

[Macha]

Given the examples of promoted API usage, it doesn't seem to have any backing away from their stance that they don't want third party clients. Add to that their API pricing was as I understand it not feasible for any new client app used by end users which gets any serious amount of usage and needs to move to paid tiers.

[detaro]

I wouldn't be surprised if you get an API that'd be better for third-party clients at the same time as all requests for API access for third-party clients are denied.

[kevincox]

Most importantly none of these items, except maybe threads require a new API. Poll results would just be added to responses, pinned tweets would be a new flag to the search endpoint and a more powerful filtering and search language can just replace the search API. It seems weird that they are tearing it all down and forcing everyone to migrate.

[raxxorrax]

Just out of curiosity: What type of application would have you interace with twitter at all? For ad purposes, some form of analysis? News aggregation?

[ilikehurdles]

Product support ticket systems use twitter and other social media sites to respond to customer feedback, as well as track and escalate issues. When you tweet complaints about your service at Comcast, there's probably a ticket created that someone from their support staff picks up. I think there's a perception that the quicker responses that these tools facilitate can help prevent negative feedback from going viral and doing broader harm to the company.

[PeterCorless]

Right. And so, for those CRMs it is vital to not just catch the first tweet. Being able to catch a thread is important to catch the rant on the third tweet in a thread that explains the exact problem.

[dewey]

Any Twitter client?

[alicemaz]

if they reintroduce user streams I'll be pleased, if they ease off the per-app user limit I'll be elated. it doesn't really mean anything if they promise such and such policies or initiatives otherwise we'd all be holding our breath for bluesky. what's important is what they actually end up doing, which I guess we'll find out next week

[cheesecracker]

Same here, I just don't trust them enough to build on their API anymore.