What you need to know
- Twitter has announced API changes that will give third-party apps access to more data.
- Like and Block data will be available to third-party Twitter apps.
Twitter has announced changes to its API that will allow third-party apps to access data about likes and clocks. The change was announced via the Twitter developer forums.
The biggest change comes in the form of Likes, with apps set to be able to access data including who likes a specific tweet. That's something that's limited to the official Twitter app right now.
Liking Tweets is one of the core features people use to engage in the public conversation on Twitter. With endpoints in our Likes lookup endpoint group, you can see a list of accounts that have liked a specified Tweet, or which Tweets a specified account has liked. You could use these endpoints to understand what kind of content a specified account or group of accounts Likes, or study how information spreads across Twitter.
It's a similar story with Blocks. Twitter says apps will be able to see the accounts that an individual user has blocked.
Blocking users is a core security feature on Twitter. Using blocks lookup, you can see who you or an authenticated user has blocked. This can be useful for determining how you interact with a given account.
The API changes will likely need developers to make changes to their apps in order to add these features, but that is something we can hope happens sooner rather than later. Some of us just can't get along with Twitter.app, and this latest news is a welcome expansion of an API that was once very limiting indeed.
