We believe an unannounced Twitter API change happened today or
yesterday, and we just want to fill the group in on our findings.
This change caused some consternation from some of our user base
("your app doesn't work!"), and we want to help preclude that for
others.As you know, if user A blocks user B, there's no easy way for user B to know that A has blocked him. On Twitter.com, user B can still view user A's friends, followers, tweet stream, and profile. Before yesterday, as far as we experienced, this used to also be the case for Twitter API calls. That's now changed. If you do authenticated calls for a blocking user, you will receive "Unauthorized" errors. These calls include statuses/user_timeline, friends/ids, followers/ids, and presumably others. While this change certainly makes sense for the otherwise limited "block" feature, I have two requests from the Twitter team: 1. Can you please match this behavior on Twitter.com? As it is, users of our app are frustrated because they can, e.g., view the user_timeline of a blocking competitor on Twitter.com, but not through our app. This leads to complaints from users saying our app is "broken". 2. Can you please tell us when API changes occur? As it is, the changelog (http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST-API-Changelog ) hasn't been updated for almost 2 months. Seemingly small changes like this can have significant consequences for apps with larger user bases.
