Re: Twitter Confirms Third-Party Apps Like Tweetbot Were Intentionally Blocked

[Richard Turner]

Agreed. I deactivated my account as soon as he fired the accessibility team just before he cut the rest of the staff in half and so on and so on.  Richard, USA. “What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do” ~ John Ruskin My web site: https://www.turner42.com On Jan 17, 2023, at 2:33 PM, Mary Otten <motte...@gmail.com> wrote:  Twitter has become crazy. Just get out. Elon Musk is not qualified to own anything, much less a massive social media app, which he has done nothing but rec. Twitter Confirms Third-Party Apps Like Tweetbot Were Intentionally Blocked MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors  /  Juli Clover Third-party Twitter apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific have been intentionally blocked from using Twitter APIs, Twitter confirmed today. Without access to the underlying code for the social network, Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Birdie, Echofon, and other popular Twitter clients are non-functional and cannot be used. Twitter's Dev account today said in a tweet that Twitter is "enforcing its long-standing API rules," a change that could cause some apps not to work. There has been no word on which API rules the blocked Twitter clients have violated, and this is the first time that Twitter has provided insight into what's going on with third-party Twitter apps since they stopped working last Thursday. When some third-party Twitter apps became unusable last week, it was initially believed that there could be some kind of bug causing the outage. Only the most popular Twitter clients were affected and blocked from Twitter's APIs, perhaps indicating an internal error. As Twitter declined to comment on the situation for days, however, it became clearer that it was an intentional decision. Over the weekend, The Information said that in an internal Slack channel, a senior software engineer at Twitter clarified that the suspensions were done on purpose, suggesting many Twitter employees were not even aware of what was going on. It is not known why Twitter has provided so little information on what is happening to highly popular third-party Twitter apps that have existed for years, nor if these apps will again be provided with access to the API if changes are made. Developers like Iconfactory and Tapbots (responsible for Twitterrific and Tweetbot, respectively), received no warning about the shutdown and were not provided with information on why their apps stopped working. Apps like Tweetbot have been around for more than a decade at this point, with loyal users, full teams of developers, and a major investment in the social network. Developers have expressed their frustration at Twitter's decision and lack of communication, as have longtime Twitter users. MacStories, for example, called Twitter's actions "disgraceful" and "unprofessional," with Twitter demonstrating a "total lack of respect" for the role that third-party apps have played in the success of the social network. Jason Snell called Twitter's actions "clueless, classless, and cowardly," and John Gruber said this is likely the end of his regular usage of Twitter as Twitter's own client is "terrible." At this point, it isn't clear when or if we're going to get more information about third-party Twitter clients from Twitter, nor if the apps that have had their API access revoked will be back in some capacity. Tapbots is now speeding up development on Ivory, its app for the Mastodon social network, and Twitterrific's Craig Hockenberry said that he will be exploring the concept of a truly universal timeline that leverages how open standards can be used in "new and different ways." Original Article: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/17/twitter-third-party-apps-intentionally-blocked/ Sent from my iPhone -- The following information is important for all members of the V iPhone list.   If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself.   Your V iPhone list moderator is Mark Taylor. Mark can be reached at: mk...@ucla.edu. Your list owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com   The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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