Twitter has delayed the release of its premium API even more. According to a tweet found by AppleInsider, the business needs additional time to finish work on the revamp. “We will be postponing the introduction of our new API platform by a few days as part of our efforts to offer an ideal experience for the developer community,” Twitter said.
When Twitter initially announced that it would be closing down its free APIs, it said that access will be terminated on February 9th. It subsequently pushed back the cutoff date to February 13th without notice. Elon Musk hasn’t stated much about how paid access to Twitter’s APIs would function, save that the business will charge $100 per month and use “ID verification” to restrict bot abuse. The business also said that it intends to provide a free access tier that would enable “excellent” bots to tweet up to 1,500 times per month.
It’s worth mentioning that third-party clients and automated account builders aren’t the only ones that utilise Twitter’s APIs. The data generated by the platform is regularly used by researchers for a number of objectives. For example, in the aftermath of the recent 7.8-magnitude earthquake that killed at least 36,000 people in Turkey and Syria, members of the Turkish diaspora used tweets to create heatmaps showing where survivors could be found, with the intention of sharing their findings with rescue crews and aid organisations.
In a recent interview with Time, data scientists and rescue workers say Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiatives, including repeated waves of layoffs since taking over the firm in October, had hindered their progress. The API modifications made by the corporation are likely to exacerbate the rescue attempt. “If the API goes down, the flow of data will cease, and people will have to depend only on slower modes of coordinating for rescue operations,” Sedat Kapanoglu, one of the project’s software programmers, told Time. “It has the potential to change people’s lives. It’s that critical.”
