Twitter has grown exponentially in popularity thanks largely to its speed, simplicity and ease of use, but a change to the way it communicates across multi-platforms has left some website owners miffed at the site’s refusal to do as it’s told.
This June saw the phasing out of the API version used by Twitter since its inception, with the social media giant citing improved rate limits as the main reason for its move to Twitter API version 1.1. For some website owners who had previously found that Twitter “talked” to their other sites and social media platforms very easily, however, the change has led to some rather ugly compatibility issues.
An API (application programming interface) is a group of functions dictating how software components communicate to each other, and is the system via which, for example, live comments on one social media site can be shared on another. Previously, developers held a fondness for Twitter because of how easily it lent itself to coding, but v1.1 has made the process somewhat less free-moving.
The website ITworld.com provided an example of how the change could make coding more cumbersome back in February, when it used the scripting tool jQuery to create a Twitter timeline. As the new API version is less flexible in its acceptance of requests, however, the link to the timeline now only leads to a rather sorry looking error message.
Twitter did give plenty of notice of the change, mentioning it as early as September 2012, but those developers who do not follow the statements of social media sites may have found themselves left out in the cold. Changes like this are a good reason why it is advisable to keep a close eye on the behaviour of Twitter, Facebook and the like, or to seek assistance from an internet marketing or SEO expert who will already be aware of such changes.
- How to find a circular reference on Excel - May 23, 2024
- Five life skills learned from internet marketing - January 3, 2024
- How artificial intelligence can (and can’t) help you write content - September 29, 2023
