Anil Dash: ‘What Twitter’s API Announcement Could Have Said’

Anil Dash does a nice job here writing Twitter’s MBA-speak written-by-committee gibberish (surely it pained Michael Sippey — who is a great writer — to put his byline on that thing) into plain English. But along the way, he also makes some assumptions about Twitter’s intentions, e.g. with this passage:

Oh, and if you need a lot of user tokens (like, more than 100,000), get in touch with us and we’ll take care of you personally. If you try to make that volume of calls without a special request, you might get shut off.

In Dash’s version, it sounds like popular apps would have to ask for but would probably be granted additional user tokens after hitting the 100K limit. In Sippey/Twitter’s actual version, there’s no such “we’ll take care of you” vibe whatsoever:

Additionally, if you are building a Twitter client application that is accessing the home timeline, account settings or direct messages API endpoints (typically used by traditional client applications) or are using our User Streams product, you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.

★ Thursday, 16 August 2012