UPDATE: Social Graph API Deprecation

[Wilhelm Bierbaum]

On December 22, 2009 we announced that the social graph method pagination of the followers/ids and friends/ids would finally be removed. We announced deprecation in September (http://bit.ly/46x1iL), November (http://bit.ly/3UQ0LU) and December (http://bit.ly/5VPWk7) of last year. The page parameter will be completely removed 1/11/2010. However, the behavior of assuming that you want the first cursor page when passing no cursor parameter will not.

In the December 2009 announcement, I explained that:

  

You should always pass a cursor parameter. Starting soon, if you fail to pass a cursor, the data returned will be that of the first cursor (-1) and the next_cursor and previous_cursor elements will be included.

In response to the feedback we received in a http://bit.ly/longDiscussionAboutTheSocialGraph we have decided not to immediately remove support for unreliably retrieving a complete friend or follower list (by passing neither page nor cursor parameters) on 1/11/2010. We understand that too many applications still depend on it. We're working on a better way to pull this data; expect another updated announcement on this list soon with further details.

We know that the cursor-based social graph APIs can be improved -- we can provide richer functionality than we currently expose. To do this, we need your help; contribute your use cases for the social graph in response to this message on http://bit.ly/TwitterDevelopmentTalk. With better understanding of how you use the graph data, we can improve the quality and variety of APIs that we provide.

Thanks!