@PistachioTwitter Developers at SXSW
While at SXSW last week, we got a chance to chat with developers working on a wide range of Twitter apps. In between brews, panels, and tech karaoke (!), we heard several pain points of building on the Twitter API platform brought up over and over again:
Expanded search history / full timeline
There are a lot of developers building interesting apps mining the data streaming through Twitter. Unfortunately, the stream-iness means that it’s difficult to access search data older than a week or more than 3200 tweets deep into a timeline. So the apps that, say, monitor mentions of names and keywords are limited in their ability to show historical information.
Many developers (myself included) are sympathetic to the problem that Twitter has to solve in order to allow greater access. Hopefully their continued move to Cassandra will make it possible to dig further back into all that tasty historical data.
Granular permissions
As developers move to OAuth before the planned June, 2010 deprecation of Basic Auth, one user experience issue is how permissions are given to their apps. Currently, when a developer registers a new app they choose whether it will just “read” or “read and write”. By Twitter’s definition a “write” is anything that updates a user’s information, such as posting a new tweet, changing their location, (un)follow actions, etc. Several developers expressed a wish for more granular permissions so that a user would more likely trust their app enough to try it out, and not worry that it would spam their friends or accidentally run amok.
Communication & Roadmap
The most frequent non-technical request was for better communication from the Twitter API team. Developers always want to know what is the horizon, so they know how to react for apps they have built or might build. The “v2” roadmap appears outdated; some of the APIs are previewed to twitter-development-talk list (like recent geo features), but there doesn’t appear to be a single source to know what is in the pipeline. The other aspect to communication is around when the platform has issues that affect downstream applications. Developers feel the pinch when OAuth has had troubles, and while many of the Platform team members have been amazingly responsive via IRC or email, there isn’t yet a consistent mechanism in place.
The Twitter platform is still maturing, but everyone I spoke with took the recent Twitter Developers meetup in March as a good step, along with the hiring of Taylor Singletary as a Developer Advocate.
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All in all, it’s an exciting time to be building on Twitter’s evolving platform, and the rough edges come with the territory. We’re all very excited for the upcoming Chirp, the first official Twitter developers conference, and we hope to see many more of you guys there.
But let’s keep the dialogue going until then.
As developers, what do you need? How can oneforty help?
