Looks like Elmo (Elon Musk) and team have finally gotten around to making big changes to the twitter API, which you can read about here.
There is a free tier if you just want to tweet. But if you want to do what I do, which is read tweets via the API, the price starts at $100/month. Yeah, no to that.
I’ve been using the Twitter API for years. At first you could programmatically interface with Twitter simply using the cURL command. That was easy to use and likely easy to abuse. Eventually Twitter did a proper set of APIs and I’ve written several programs over the years — first using Perl and then using Python — to post tweets and to read them.
My last project was tracking a group of users to see if Twitter usage was declining and twitter was dying. As of sometime in May, I did not see any decline in use. But who knows going forward. I am not going to pay $100 a month to find out.
It’s too bad: the new API code looks good and the tech people at twitter — not Elmo — have done a good job with the documentation, sample code at github, etc. Perhaps they will surprise me and they will get lots of people to use it and throw money at them. Or maybe it will be as unsuccessful as the Twitter blue checkmark program.
Smart People I Know 