Twitter’s API doesn’t subscribe to its own privacy mechanisims. In other words, all those for-friend-only tweets you’ve been sending are viewable by anyone using an API app. Whoops.
Am I the only person who has been generally unimpressed by twitter as a web service? Nevermind the fact that I just don’t get very interested in the purpose of the site, but the service itself has largely sucked. The site is sometimes painfully slow, the API is constantly unresponse (I use it myself to collect friends’ twitter status, and I get error e-mails all the time from my script saying the API URL wasn’t responding), they’ve public aired out their dirty laundry with Rails and it’s scalability (or lack thereof), and now they didn’t even bother to make the API care about privacy?
I respect Evan Williams and always thought Blogger and Odeo were quite well-done — but Twitter just seems like it’s made by the same bunch of amateurs that are responsible for MySpace. I’m sure they’re great people, but it sure seems like they have a lot of trouble with their application.
Update: It appears this report was incorrect. Rather, the lack of privacy exhibited in some Twitter API apps have been the fault of those apps, not Twitter itself. I still stand by most of what I said, though. Twitter just seems to have more problems than it’s worth, to me.
001 // Wilson Miner // 05.24.2007 // 4:25 PM
I noticed the same thing about the del.icio.us API a while back. Links marked “do not share” not only aren’t excluded from the API requests by default, there’s no (documented way) to filter them out at all.
002 // Rob Goodlatte // 05.24.2007 // 10:19 PM
I’ve played around with the Twitter API a bit — unfortunately I found it hard to build anything interesting without asking for a user to log in with his or her twitter username / password. For desktop apps like Twitterific this doesn’t bother me as much (because I assume its not being dumped into a huge database somewhere, but who knows), but I’ve never liked the idea of sharing my Twitter password with a 3rd party.
I believe you can do validation based on the cookie Twitter sets when you log in, but I never quite figured that one out.
003 // Oliver Beattie // 05.25.2007 // 8:57 AM
Agreed – Twitter’s API is horrible. I too get those unresponsive errors – more or less every 5 seconds.
Grrr.