Twitter’s Latest Update To Improve Third-Party Apps

Washington, May 22: Twitter announced an update on Friday that will greatly improve the experience of third-party Twitter apps. This gives developers much more access to the reverse-chronological timeline. This update to Twitter's recently released API v2 is the interface that developers use to pull data from Twitter, a new step for Twitter on its journey to better support developers.

As Twitter notes in its announcement post, the new API v2 feature gives developers a way to "retrieve the most recent Tweets and Retweets posted by the authenticated user and the accounts they follow." In other words, a developer can ask to see the data that Twitter shows you when you load up the first-party app with the 'Latest Tweets' option selected, so their app can show it to you instead, as per The Verge. Parag Agrawal, Twitter CEO, Announces Flexible Work Culture For Employees, Says You Can Work From Home Forever or Office Every Day.

This feature is a very welcome one for third-party clients like Tweetbot. One of Tweetbot's developers, Paul Haddad, quoted in a Twitter announcement that the old way to get a user's timeline is "one of our most commonly used API calls." The older version of the API was introduced in 2012, where developers who used it were facing limits when trying to get a user's timeline.

In an email to The Verge, Haddad explained that the change will make Tweetbot more responsive to users. "We'll simply be able to refresh the timeline more often and allow users to scroll much further back in their timeline." From a development standpoint, he says, it makes things much simpler. "We currently use the v1.1 home timeline API to get a list of Tweets and then v2 APIs to fill in any v2 specific data (polls, cards, metrics, etc). With this new v2 version we can get all that data in a single step."

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