Twitter is bringing some reply and conversation controls and new endpoints for developers in its second-gen API

Some time back, Twitter had made some changes in its API, and it affected third-party developers a lot who use Twitter’s API using Twitter’s platform to develop apps like Tweetbot, Twitteriffic, etc. The changes involved the removal of various features that helped the developers. However, in July 2020, Twitter announced the second generation of its API with the addition of some of those features back to Twitter v2 API. Now, Twitter has made another important announcement that it is expanding the features in this second-generation API to add more controls for the conversations and replies.

TechCrunch has recently reported that apart from this conversation and reply controls, several new endpoints are also going to be offered that will enable the developers and third-party clients and offer them more Twitter features.

According to Twitter, users can now choose to whom they want to receive replies. They can allow everyone, or they can restrict their replies to only their followers or the people they have mentioned in their tweet. These features are partially supported in the current API and can be altered through a field in the tweet object called ‘Reply settings.’ This addition will let the developers know if the conversation reply settings were set for a tweet and who can reply and who cannot.

Previously, there was a feature that would allow filtering of tweets, blocking several people that the user wanted and mentioned specific accounts. The feature also allowed the user to retrieve the tweets from a particular time period. This feature was removed earlier, but now, Twitter is bringing it back in its official API as these were some of the most used API endpoints by developers.

But these endpoints now come with certain limitations. First off, the developers can retrieve around 100 tweets per request, but the ‘user tweet timeline’ endpoint will bring about 3200 most recent tweets. The ‘user mention timeline’ API endpoint is restricted to the 800 latest tweets.

This API with the recent additions is currently in a restricted Beta testing mode, but developers can still access it. Developers can access it through Twitter’s website. It will officially be introduced around the first half of next year.

These API expansions will surely benefit the third-party clients a lot with their app development using Twitter’s platform.



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