I am writing a story on the Twitter API, and I am curious how others see it, and wanted to solicit some quotes for my story. If you are interested --- Why was the Twitter API Important? Or if you feel, why was it not i mportant?
@kin For me it was important because it enabled creativity around a hugely important body of cultural data and empowered folk with more control over their experience of engaging with the platform. Sigh.
@kin my vote is it was important in how unimportant it was.
over the years it has been open, closed, open, fear of closing, open, etc so many times. was not worth the grey hairs.
yeah, a few people did decent with it. on the grand scale of the population: nah.
it griefs more people than not when a site removes their auth and stuff. which is about to grief a lot of people here pdq.
@kin the API was the reason I got interested in #Twitter. At the time I was building campaign software for political activism, and integrating it made me realize- Twitter is an #API for public opinion.
I suppose that says something about the state of outrage and hate in the world, given where it's all ended up.
@kin Kin, scalability and reach.
APIs and 🤖 code allow you to do things a human cannot. Using cheap commodity hardware, a well documented Python module and some custom code, since 2017 I’ve run a service ¥ that read out lines from Jane Austin novels, one line at a time every 15 minutes.
Humans cannot tweet as regularly as my 🤖 code. It is stable enough to run for months without intervention. I targeted #JaneAusten, a popular author and grew the readership to almost 3K. Not big numbers, but read by a significant portion of the serious Austen readers and scholars on twitter.
I started if for a challenge and kept it running for fun. You can read more of the technical bits here: <https://seldomlogical.com/pureausten.html>
@kin my first encounter with the Twitter API was before Search existed, and I just wanted to search my own posts. I was surprised at how difficult it was to be "allowed" to do that.
@kin the #dotcons were traps to close the radical push of the #openweb Twitter and it's closed/controlling #API was the sweet pill to first capture then poison the power of "news"
Like most of the other #dotcons we gorged on this addictive mess until we got to where we are now.
http://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Dotcons+