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What Just Broke?: Twitter to Charge for Basic API Access
Giving developers one week's notice, Twitter announced it would introduce fees for access to its base API. Defenders and detractors have come out swinging.
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Once again, Elon Musk's Twitter rolls the dice with a new plan to monetize some of the company's assets.Bob Daemmrich via Alamy Stock
At about 1 a.m. on the East Coast, TwitterDev posted that free access to the basic Twitter API would stop on February 9.
That effectively gave one week’s notice to users of the API with, at the time of recording, no details on pricing.
TwitterDev also said the company is “committed to enabling fast and comprehensive access ” to its data sets so developers could continue to build with them.
The response has been vocal and robust. Defenders of the announcement claimed this would nuke spamming bots and scammers. Detractors of the announcement said it would hobble legitimate automation, data collection, research, and applications that relied on Twitter for years. This also comes after Twitter blocked some third-party apps in January from its API, killing off the likes of Tweetbot.
This is not a complete surprise, but the abruptness of the potential loss of access to the API leaves little time, just one week, for its users to decide what their plans of action might be.
Listen to the full episode of "What Just Broke" for more:
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