But an API can also be informal and improvisational. Hashtags are a kind of API: a developer who scrapes Twitter can use hashtags to figure out what each post is about. APIs can also be added by third parties: a developer who scrapes Twitter and categorizes posts by hashtag can then set up a more formal way for others to pull those out of their own database, without doing all that messy scraping.
At its outset, Twitter was, in fact, an API. The core of Twitter was a database of users’ posts that users themselves had no way to access. In order to post or read tweets, users had to make use of a program that used the Twitter API to access the database, pulling out the relevant entries and presenting them in a human-readable form.
Twitter made one of those API-accessing programs, but it also allowed anyone else to make such programs, and they all accessed the same API. It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary this was: normally companies give themselves privileged access to their own infrastructure. The API they expose to third parties is a weak, thin version of the private tool.
But not Twitter: it gave first-class access to all comers, and developers threw their resources into the project of building all kinds of ways of accessing Twitter. Some of these may be familiarto you, like TweetDeck, which Twitter eventually acquired and brought in-house. Others were strictly “programmatic” — tools that made it easier for other developers to do cool things with Twitter, like operate bots that answered queries, told jokes, or automated public safety announcements.
Twitter also paid close attention to its users. Users invented “retweeting” by typing “RT” and copying and pasting someone else’s tweet into the composition box. Twitter noticed this and automated the process, creating a one-click system for retweeting anything on the system.
People loved using Twitter. It was playful. It was…
Auteur: Cory Doctorow
