Thoughts about all of this “Twitter API” chatter

First, it’s not the “Twitter API” if it’s found on WordPress or Tumblr (not to mention that this API compatibility has been in Identi.ca (aka Laconi.ca) for almost a year now) – it’s just an API that is Twitter-compatible.

Second, the endpoints used to access an API are, at most, 1/3 of what makes up an API – the most important part of an API is the data passed to and also from those endpoints to do the tasks that the endpoints enable.

So sure WordPress and Tumblr have a Twitter-compatible API but what happens when Twitter changes how one of the endpoints work, like they did when they recently changed how since_id works or even how re-tweets work. At best the other sites will be able to make similar changes but the worse case scenario is that they won’t or cannot make the changes and then things start to get ugly. Anyone remember RSS 0.93? or even the blog related API’s to make posts from clients – all suffered from fragmentation.

That is not to say I am not excited to see the API pattern used by Twitter is being more widely adopted, it’s a well thought out and functional API – I just think that crowning it the King of micro-blogging APIs is a bit premature until the *whole* API, data formats and all, is documented.

Tags: developers, technology

This entry was posted on December 18th, 2009 and is filed under code, mutterings, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.