Just wanted to give you an update on what's going on Twitter API land.
Firstly, my colleague on the API Team, Matt Sanford (@mzsanford), is
in town from Seattle and working from the Twitter offices. We're
trying to make the most of this in-person time to clear out
administrivia and plan the next several weeks of work.
We've just finished cleaning up the list of API issues and enhancement
requests (http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list). We've
closed, updated, re-prioritized, and generally attended to all tickets
in the system. We have a number of fixes that are waiting on other
parts of the Twitter engineering team to ship, and we've tried to
clearly note which tickets aren't going to be dealt with until the
next major release of the API.
Just yesterday, Matt finished working with our Operations team to move
Twitter Search to Twitter's data center. The Search API should now
return results more quickly, and we believe that we've increased our
queries per second (QPS) capacity as well.
Additionally, Matt has been working with our User Experience (UX) team
on a beta of OAuth support. The UX component of this work is almost
complete, and we should be ready for our first deploy in the next week
or ten days. The only potential blocker to this launch is the
database schema changes it entails, which may be delayed by our
Operations team as part of a broader set of database work.
Having completed performance tests to our satisfaction, a colleague of
ours has been testing our HTTP-based firehose solution for correctness
and stability. So far he's uncovered no issues, and we should be
starting a beta period with this service in a matter of days.
Apologies for not having the beta going by Thanksgiving, but hopefully
this additional testing will mean fewer issues and a reduced
time-to-production.
Our next major priority remains the rewrite of the Twitter API, which
encompasses a variety of backend and frontend changes. We were hoping
to have much of this work completed by the end of the year, and while
I believe it'll be underway, I don't expect that it will be complete
until early next year.
If you have any questions about our priorities and projects, please
let us know. Thanks!
--
Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/al3x
Nifty.
Anything y'all can share about the thinking behind your OAuth UX
decisions would be very helpful (not just how it ends up looking, but
the sorts of things that were of concern, differerent options you
considered, etc). That stuff's pure gold for others facing similar
sorts of decisions. Not totally on topic, I'm just saying...
-cks
--
Christopher St. John
http://artofsystems.blogspot.com
--
Generally, though, we're still the same service and we've still got
the same data to share with API clients, so the actual response
formats themselves should change very little, save some new attributes
popping up. Our main goal is moving the API onto a high-performance
app server and optimizing such that we no longer have to burden all
but the most aggressive clients with rate limiting.