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.

Earlier today I saw the following Twitter post from Blaine:

And just like that, whoosh, we’re serving Atom-over-XMPP.

Nice job Twitter crew, sure enough in the body of the xmpp message is embedded the twitter post but formatted as Atom with all of the metadata goodness API consumers are just going to eat up.

One of the things that has kept me returning to Twitter for all my micro/presence blogging has been it’s simple and easy IM bot – just send it a message and you have posted. All posts from people I follow (and direct messages) are also sent to me.

Well now Jaiku has joined the ranks of Jabber-enabled apps and it has raised the stakes considerably with some great features.

Jaiku has for a while now supported channels and the bot will let you post and reply to channels as well as to your presence stream.

Nice job RalphM and the Jaiku team!

After a couple email conversations about suggested changes and the like, Decklin Foster has been added to the commit list – woo!

More bugs were slain, some new parameters were added and a general code tidying-up ensued – enough that we decided to push the release button on 0.3.

Details on the project are on the pyTwerp code.google page, details about the 0.3 changes are in the CHANGES.txt file and the download bits are here.

I received via the Issue Tracker for pytwerp 3 bug reports but also 3 patches from Decklin Foster who is using Twerp enough to start noticing bugs :)

Woo! Go Open Source!

Anywho, because the patches were mostly one-liners and fixed bugs, I applied them and rolled out version 0.2 which can be downloaded from either the pytwerp code.google site or from my code library page for Twerp.

Decklin and I are comparing notes and swapping patches on some other changes to Twerp, so more changes will be coming soon. I offered to add him to the project so look for that to happen.\