Twitter is replacing free access to its API with a new paid tier:
Twitter will no longer provide free access to the Twitter API from February 9th. As announced by the official Twitter Developer account late Wednesday night, Elon Musk's social media hobby will stop supporting free access to the Twitter API and will instead provide a "paid basic tier." Twitter hasn't provided any information regarding pricing, but said that it will provide "more details on what you can expect next week."
[...] Twitter's API — abbreviated from Application Programming Interface — allows third parties to retrieve and analyze public Twitter data, which can then be used to create programmable bots and separate applications that connect to the platform, such as Pikaso, Thread Reader, and RemindMe_OfThis. Twitter currently provides limited free access to its API alongside premium, scalable tiers for developers that need to lift restrictions on accessing endpoints and unlock additional enterprise features. Twitter does not publicly disclose the price of its premium API tiers, though it was reported in February last year that fees start from $99 a month and increase depending on the level of access required.
[...] Many small developers have used Twitter's free API access to create fun tools and useful bots like novelty weather trackers and black-and-white image colorizers which are not intended to earn income or turn a profit. As a result, it's likely that many bots and tools utilizing Twitter's free API access will need to charge a fee or be shut down. It would also impact third parties like students and scientists who use the platform to study online behavior and gather information for research papers.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by The Vocal Minority on Sunday February 05, @11:50AM
..after your scheduled two minutes of hate.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday February 05, @12:42PM (5 children)
Is it still a thing?
(Score: 2, Troll) by The Vocal Minority on Sunday February 05, @12:58PM (2 children)
No, it's dead and buried. Just like windows after a series of RPC exploits meant you couldn't connect a widows box to the internet without getting owned. You remember Windows? And like Facebook after all the privacy violations became public. Zuck's disingenuous apologies sure didn't cut it with most of the user-base after a while. /s
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 05, @04:53PM
Maybe if you didn't put those widows into a box … :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 06, @04:57PM
Is it still a thing?
(Score: 5, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Sunday February 05, @05:15PM (1 child)
No, Coca Cola is still the "Real Thing." Well, except for not having any cocaine or cane sugar anymore...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by tizan on Monday February 06, @04:45PM
No cane sugar is a very US thing only. In most other countries it is cane sugar and in Mexico i am sure you can get cocaine on the side with it !
(Score: 2) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Sunday February 05, @09:09PM (2 children)
"It would also impact third parties ... who use the platform to study online behavior"
Seems like this might be in response to AI scrubbers. I'd bet Musk's ChatGPT is
exempt from charges on this.
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Monday February 06, @01:27AM (1 child)
Musk the financial genius rides again. First, you scare away ten billion dollars worth of advertising. Then you make the API pay-per-view, which is bound to bring in hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Things are just going up and up with genius Elon at the helm!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06, @03:29AM
Don't forget charging companies $1000/mo to rent the blue check mark. Genius. Everyone will have to paaaaaaay! *cackle*
(Score: 1, Interesting) by crafoo on Sunday February 05, @10:57PM (2 children)
the best thing about twitter is all of the odd, out in the weeds groups talking shop. about any organization, business, or career path you can imagine there are people on twitter doing it and talking about it. even government think tanks, intelligence goons, modern weapons developers, board game creators, metallurgists, everything under the sun.
I guess random public and private forums as well as IRC used to be the place to explore these groups. They're all on twitter now, and twitter search is kind of incredible.
(Score: 4, Touché) by MIRV888 on Sunday February 05, @11:54PM
It's incredible if you can express your topic in 140 characters.
Forums are still the place to find in depth conversations about complicated topics (which most things are).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06, @03:34AM
Don't you mean Reddit? Or Usenet? I've actually never spent any time on Twitter... walled garden and all that.
(Score: 1) by MonkeypoxBugChaser on Monday February 06, @01:54PM
So that means we'll have less bots?
"Students" get to lose access to their data mining?
I think I'm going to cry /s
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday February 06, @07:49PM
⠀
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...