“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API”

Re:“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free acce... by logifail on Friday February 03, 2023 @04:02AM (#34638917)

> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem

I'd love to have free API access to all kinds of companies.

Think how much easier and faster it would be booking your travel if all airlines and hotels let you straight in to the raw pricing and availability data from their reservation systems.

Think how much money you could save if retailers exposed all their product availability and pricing data, live.

They don't, because they all regard this stuff as "commercially sensitive".

Why should Twitter be any different?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free acce... by ndsipa_pomu on Friday February 03, 2023 @07:42AM (#34640322)

Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive as you don't typically want the end consumers to see how much profit is being made from them and how much discount is given to wholesalers.

Twitter data is rarely anything to do with pricing, so that's why it's different.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free acce... by logifail on Friday February 03, 2023 @08:24AM (#34640733)

> Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive [..]

I'm not after internal pricing/B2B pricing/discounting, in my thought experiment I "just" want free API access to information that's already on public websites (eg end-user/retail pricing for rooms/flights/widgets). I'm not aware of any airlines/hotels/retailers that allow even that. In bulk, it's commercially sensitive too.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free acce... by ndsipa_pomu on Friday February 03, 2023 @10:37AM (#34642452)

I've heard that they do a lot of price manipulation with holidays, so I can see why they wouldn't want to provide enough data for customers to track prices over time. Also, you'd be bypassing their advertising.

But yeah, it would be great if we didn't have to use their websites to navigate the data.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free acce... by logifail on Friday February 03, 2023 @11:48AM (#34643671)

> you'd be bypassing their advertising.

Right.

So back to where we started: what's actually wrong with Twitter deciding to insist on eyeballs on twitter.com instead of scripts pointing at their free API?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free acce... by ndsipa_pomu on Friday February 03, 2023 @01:42PM (#34645892)

I wouldn't say that it's necessarily 'wrong', but I do think it's a bad decision. The problem is that they've let people have access and build upon their free API and pulling the rug from under them is going to annoy them and generate bad will towards Twitter.

In some ways it reminds me of the Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast licensing shenanigans where the business is annoying people building an ecosystem around their products which arguably adds a lot of value.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free acce... by logifail on Friday February 03, 2023 @02:22PM (#34646502)

> The problem is that they've let people have access and build upon their free API and pulling the rug from under them is going to annoy them [..]

Yup, although we all know that Twitter just the latest example in a loooong line of companies to have pulled this stunt since, well, what feels like forever.

> and generate bad will towards Twitter

I'm fairly ambivalent about this aspect, and I doubt Musk cares much, it's not as though the haters weren't already hating before this latest incident.

[ Parent | on HN ]