Twitter has been in the news for wrong reasons lately. The social networking site drew flak due to its decision to change its API policy.

APIs are used by third-party developers to build either Twitter-related apps or integrate Twitter feeds into their apps – such as Instapaper.

If you use the Web version of Twitter or Twitter’s official client, the changes don’t matter to you. But if use a third-party Twitter client or a service that uses the Twitter API, you have reason to worry. One of the changes was Twitter’s decision to end support for RSS, atom and XML.

Those who have been using third-party clients have been getting annoying ‘API errors’. This is because of one of the restrictions in the API is that Twitter now allows only 15 ‘calls’ every 15 minutes. For die-hard Tweeples, this is pittance. They are likely to exhaust the 15 calls within a few minutes and end up getting errors when the 15-minute period is over.

There are ways out. One way is to use the official Twitter client. The other way is to use third-party Twitter clients like Plume that provide streaming facility as opposed to ‘calls’.

Twitter has also mandated that third-party applications and sites must henceforth use only the OAuth authentication. At first glance, it may seem that it does not mean much for the end user but privacy-conscious fans will not be too happy.

Twitter will now be able to monitor who is using the data and how it is being used. The irritating error message that pops up if you are using a third-party client without streaming is enough for die-hard users to rant against Twitter…in Twitter, of course.

> dinakaran.rengachary@gmail.com

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