Last July, Twitter released the new version of its API, known as ‘Twitter API v2’, which involved a complete reconstruction of this interface, which allows the development of applications based on this social network, now they will give specific access for academic research.
In recent days, however, the company has announced several new features that will be implemented in the API from now on and throughout next year.
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Features of the new Twitter API
In July the API incorporated new elements implemented in the social network, such as spam filtering, polls or anchored tweets, it is now incorporating new features such as the possibility of indicating who can respond to each tweet, through a field in the ‘Tweet’ object called ‘reply_settings’.
In addition, there are other API-specific features, such as the option of displaying the timeline of particular accounts or collecting the tweets that mention a particular account.
In these first months, developers will be able to access 100 tweets from these timelines in each request, with the first timeline (the user timeline) limited to the most recent 3200 tweets and the second timeline (the mention timeline) limited to 800. Both will count towards the monthly limit of tweets in the standard basic access, which is 500,000.
In addition, the way to access the relationships of an account (i.e. the list of accounts that follow a particular user, or the list of accounts that a user follows) has also been reformed, allowing now to extract the information in a single request to the API, instead of forcing the developer to string several of them together.
New access methods
Finally, in addition to the standard access to the API, Twitter plans to create an access aimed at academic research (for “professors, activists, artists, etc”), which will offer a higher monthly limit of free access to the API, as well as improved features for more accurate and complete data.
“Today, academic researchers are one of the largest groups of people using the Twitter API to study the public conversation to understand what’s happening. Our goal is to support even more of this work, so we are building a solution tailored for research needs.”
Finally, the business mode of access to the API will be streamlined and simplified, providing companies with wider access to data.
Good news for developers of Twitter-based apps, after several years marked by all sorts of company scams, including blocking API access to other companies or canceling their developer conference.
