When Twitter announced its new API last month, the company referred to the changes as a “consistent Twitter experience” across platforms and devices. Now that it has officially unveiled version 1.1 of its API, the changes now clearly include the end to support to RSS, XML and Atom, and further restrictions to third-party clients.RSS and atom are major formats for syndicating web feeds and are widely used by developers because it includes the use of text, audio, video and other types of media and also used as a way to display tweets in locations other than the Twitter page. The RSS integration allowed developers to integrate Twitter feeds and search queries, like the use of hashtags in websites. In short, Twitter is abandoning RSS and will be favoring JSON in the new 1.1 API. It will also require authentication via OAuth 1.0a for all endpoints, which will make it a lot harder for developers to integrate Twitter into their projects, versus the earlier more open RSS/Atom.
What do you think of this Twitter move? Let us know in the comments.
