We like Twitter, and we liked it even before all the celebs started turning it into their megaphone (or Maga-phone). We liked it before the sentiment of every public event was simulcast on live news shows trying to stay relevant to an audience that was leaving them for online news. We liked Twitter when they had the most open API of any social network and allowed developers to create truly innovative combinations pretty much untethered. We still like Twitter, but I’m sure a lot of developers out there don’t share that sentiment as of the last few months.
According to the Twitter blog, “In the past year, we have made changes to how we manage access to our developer products so that we can continue to ensure our developer platform remains open and broadly accessible while having more visibility and control over how developers use both our platform and public data. We’ve also continued to proactively monitor for potential abuse of our developer platform and APIs, resulting in over 162,000 app suspensions in the second half of 2018.”
162,000 app suspensions–that’s unfathomable–and it has to be a good thing to clean up the bots, spammers, scammers and just plain antiquated or obsolete space junk orbiting the Twittersphere, right?
Let me know if your Twitter timeline seems better or worse in the last few months.