Following up on the release of today’s Twitter Lite launch, the company has laid out new plans in launching a new developer API experience later this year. According to Twitter, they will be unifying the API platform so that businesses and developers can scale new applications. Citing companies like Sprout Social and the USGS, Twitter hopes to refine the platform’s API to help these businesses innovate.
Twitter’s API has been a point of contention between the company and developers. Many third-party Twitter apps have gone so far as building out their own custom systems to parse through the Twitter data they want. With today’s announcements, Twitter is redefining the API experience by making it easier for developers to get and parse through that data.
In creating a unified API experience, developers will be able to filter data from Twitter, easily search through Twitter archives, and even get realtime account data like Likes and Follows. This of course means that depending on the type of business the developer is building for, they may need different levels of scale for the data. Twitter is offering free access and paid access, depending on the developer’s current and future needs.
On top of an API overhaul, Twitter is also set to build out new products and solutions based on the data they have. Noting that Twitter “represents the largest openly searchable corpus of human conversation in history,” Twitter will be launching a new API to help developers parse through this data. With their new offering, the company will help businesses discover what “products to build, how to market them, who their customers are, and what people think of their products and services”.
One strong point of discussion from today’s announcements also points to improvements in the way businesses interact with customers. Twitter will be launching new APIs that developers can create applications around that help foster the “next generation of customer experiences” combining “human service and automation”.
Twitter is laying out its product roadmap through 2018 to help make this all visible. Starting today, Twitter launched a new Account Activity API and a new Direct Message API.
An updated and improved Twitter API means that third-party applications would be able to better integrate and improve their product offerings. Apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific will be able to further refine their code, but more importantly create new experiences that weren’t possible before.
These updates from Twitter today represent what looks to be a new direction in developer relations from the company. Not everything announced today will be available immediately, but it does show signs that they’re actively working on improving the overall third-party experience.
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