PreCentral: The Twitter 1.1 API and what it means for webOS

[News Reporter]

Twitter, that lovely place where we all send random 140 character snippets of news, thoughts, and rants. Love it or hate it Twitter is an important part of social networking and has played a very important part in the webOS community over the years. Some of this platform’s first great apps (

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) were Twitter clients. Whether you’re following for the latest and greatest in webOS news or one of the many awesome developers out there you probably use Twitter even if it’s just to spectate the conversations. Due to the popularity of this social network within the webOS community we have had the blessing of many truly great third party Twitter clients over the years. Unfortunately due to webOS’ current status of uncertainty developers abandoned our treasured platform in search of ecosystems with a pulse thus abandoning or removing their apps from the webOS App Catalog.

As time moved on Twitter slowly changed their API (software components developers use to access services in a nutshell) to “better” their product. When the API changed if a developer didn’t update their app said app’s functionality would break or cease to work altogether. One quick search through the App Catalog for Twitter will result in a graveyard of apps that have been abandoned. Several months back we composed a roundup of that could still be had on webOS and unfortunately that list is about to get a bit smaller soon.

On March 5th (that’s less than a week away folks!) Twitter will begin what they call “blackout tests” for API v1 and fully retiring @Anywhere API altogether. According to Twitter’s developer site the first test will run from 9:00am 10:00am PST on March 5th. During this test they temporarily retire the old API to let developers know how their apps will be affected. After the first test more tests will be announced before, during, and after each test by . The eventual endgame is to fully retire the old v1 API for Twitter in the near future and apps need to migrate to the new API or they will be forever broken.

So what does this mean for us? In a nutshell it means that a lot of our favorite apps that developers have left behind will cease to function. So if you’re still using an app like , Bad Kitty, or to access or interact with Twitter in anyway now would be a good time to move on. We have reached out to several developers on this matter and so far we know for a fact there are a couple of diehard developers that have either updated their app already or have plans to. Here is the short list that we have been able to confirm so far (we'll be updating this list if/when other developers update their apps):

We know that list is small but we are happy to see that there are still dedicated developers for webOS out there that are dedicated to keep their apps up to date after all that this platform has been through. We thank all of them for all their hard work and urge our readers to open up the App Catalog and buy all of these apps if you don’t already have them. If the app is free get ahold of the developer and see how you can go about donating to them or at least give them a huge thank you for their continued support of webOS.