Hi all, Just wanted to give you an update on what's going on Twitter API land.
Firstly, my colleague on the API Team, Matt Sanford (@mzsanford), is in town from Seattle and working from the Twitter offices. We're trying to make the most of this in-person time to clear out administrivia and plan the next several weeks of work. We've just finished cleaning up the list of API issues and enhancement requests (http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list). We've closed, updated, re-prioritized, and generally attended to all tickets in the system. We have a number of fixes that are waiting on other parts of the Twitter engineering team to ship, and we've tried to clearly note which tickets aren't going to be dealt with until the next major release of the API. Just yesterday, Matt finished working with our Operations team to move Twitter Search to Twitter's data center. The Search API should now return results more quickly, and we believe that we've increased our queries per second (QPS) capacity as well. Additionally, Matt has been working with our User Experience (UX) team on a beta of OAuth support. The UX component of this work is almost complete, and we should be ready for our first deploy in the next week or ten days. The only potential blocker to this launch is the database schema changes it entails, which may be delayed by our Operations team as part of a broader set of database work. Having completed performance tests to our satisfaction, a colleague of ours has been testing our HTTP-based firehose solution for correctness and stability. So far he's uncovered no issues, and we should be starting a beta period with this service in a matter of days. Apologies for not having the beta going by Thanksgiving, but hopefully this additional testing will mean fewer issues and a reduced time-to-production. Our next major priority remains the rewrite of the Twitter API, which encompasses a variety of backend and frontend changes. We were hoping to have much of this work completed by the end of the year, and while I believe it'll be underway, I don't expect that it will be complete until early next year. If you have any questions about our priorities and projects, please let us know. Thanks! -- Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc. http://twitter.com/al3x
