Recent API changes and new fields

[Matt Harris]

Hey everyone, 

This week we rolled out a couple of new data fields for the status and user objects. For a while it has been difficult for you to get the number of lists a user is listed in, or the number of times a Tweet has been retweeted. You were also finding it hard to know if the user had retweeted the status themselves or not. The feature requests you filed and the messages on the developer mailing list showed this is a pain point for many of you as it uses up many of your hourly API requests.

These fields are live now and many of you have already seen them in our API responses. We intended to tell you about these changes before they were live, and in the future for things like this we will, but this time around our system for doing that didn't work. The good news is we know what went wrong and have made the necessary improvements needed to ensure you are notified before the changes happen.

The recent changes which have been made affect the user and status objects. In both cases we have added fields:

To the user object:

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listed_count

represents the number of public lists a user is listed in. This field is an integer. As this is a new field it is possible some users will not have a listed_count value yet.

follow_request_sent

representing whether the user you are authenticating as has requested to follow the user you are viewing. This will be false unless the friendship request is pending. The field is a boolean and will be true or false.

To the status object:

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retweet_count

represents the number of times a status has been retweeted using the Twitter retweet action. This field is an integer. There will not be a value for this field when the feature is turned off, or the Tweet was created before we added retweet_count support.

retweeted

represents whether the user you are authenticating as has retweeted this status or not. The field is a boolean and can be true or false. 

Changes to existing methods

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users/show

When requesting data for suspended users the user/show used to return an HTTP 404 status code - it now returns HTTP 403.

This change is in response to number of users who were asking if there was a way to know if a user they were getting data for had been deleted or was instead suspended. The change means the API agrees with the twitter.com in that we confirm a user exists, but that you may not see their information because they are suspended.

If you call /users/show on a suspended user the API response will include the error message "User has been suspended."

Please remember we sometimes turn features off to maintain site stability. We recommend you always check a field exists before attempting to use it and be prepared for the value to be empty. This will help ensure your code stays stable if we have to turn features off. We'll also be adding this information to the main API documentation soon.

Best,

Matt Harris
Developer Advocate, Twitter
http://twitter.com/themattharris