Yesterday, a group of developers put up a web site pointing out Twitter’s plans to deprecate streaming services, critical for third party Twitter apps (our post about this is here).
Following a wave of protest, from developers and users alike, Twitter responded in a series of tweets:
While I’m glad to see Twitter respond, I’ll be interested to see the response from Twitter devs. Is this simply delaying the end, or is Twitter’s announced Accounts Activity API an adequate solution to keep third party Twitter apps in the game?
In software, deprecation means that we are marking this library or API obsolete. This means we’ll patch it for bugs but not add new features which gives you time to convert your dependent systems to a different version.
What Twitter was really talking about was killing off it’s API’s without an overlap period or adequate replacement.
So, instead of “deprecation,” they might have more appropriately said “defecation.”
It’d be nice to imagine they’re testing the waters before making a concrete decision. I’m not inclined to give Twitter’s owners credit for that much foresight.