Twitter ruffled a lot of feathers earlier this month when it announced plans to cut off free access to its API. The company initially set a Feb. 9 deadline to enforce the rule, but later pushed it back to Feb. 13. Now the social network has again delayed the shutdown of the free API – and this time there is no date in the latest of the growing list of uncertainties. in the company owned by Elon Musk.
The Developer Twitter account said late Monday that the company would delay the launch of the new API platform “a few more days.” There has been “tremendous excitement” for the upcoming platform change, the company insisted.
Over the past few weeks, the developer community has expressed concerns on the social media company’s lack of transparency and information. The company partly responded to this by briefly putting the developer forum website behind a login last week without any explanation. The site, now open again, is inundated with questions from developers asking for clarification on pricing for the new API.
The delay also jeopardizes developers’ and startups’ plans to build tools around the Twitter API, as they would have no clarity on future spending and budget allocation on the platform.
Twitter said last week that the base API tier with “low-level usage” would be priced at $100, but did not share how much usage falls under the “low-level” bracket. . The company also said it will provide a free, write-only API that’s ideal for posting 1,500 tweets per month. This followed Elon Musk’s promise to provide a lightweight API to “good” content provider bots.
A lot of academics And researchers also worry about having to spend money to access Twitter data, which was previously available for free as part of the Twitter API v2 academic search.
