1. Focusing API efforts on 3 main areas
   1. Reliability
   2. Developer Happiness
   3. Utility
2. New internal “Developer Advocate” (Taylor)
3. When can we access past 3000 tweets??
   1. big focus, working on it
4. http://dev.twitter.com
   1. Developer portal
   2. API Blog to be revived
   3. Better docs, etc
5. HTTP Basic going away in June
   1. xAuth to exchange user/pass for OAuth token
      1. Only for non-web apps
   2. Everyone else use OAuth
6. Signup API
   1. Might be exposed
   2. Available to very limited partners
   3. More of a policy decision
7. api@twitter.com
   1. Email for access to xAuth/any other biz-dev type things related to API
8. OAuth Echo
   1. Delegated OAuth access
   2. Will be available before HTTP Basic is deprecated
   3. Allows you to “pass authentication around”
9. Inefficient to retweet counts
   1. Adding “object counts” to a lot of objects
      1. Retweets
      2. List membership
10. Streaming API replaces XMPP
    1. XMPP never coming back
       1. It doesn’t scale for one to many(?)
    2. Firehose = 100%
    3. Gardenhose = 15%
    4. Spritzer = 5%
11. HTML5 geo tags will be supported
12. Quarterly meetups similar to this
    1. Roadmap
    2. Upcoming
    3. Community developments
13. Username to email resolving API?
    1. Used to be available
    2. Spammer’s heaven
    3. Looking at ways to expose something similar, without being spammable
    4. Address Book API coming soon
14. Commercial Licensing (data) is be part of their revenue model
15. Favorites system highish prio to be “improved”
    1. Favorite?
    2. +1?
    3. Like?
    4. Bookmark?
16. New Big Data store
    1. Cassandra
    2. Spearheaded by Ryan King
17. Analytics on API usage etc
    1. Will start posting to blog
    2. They are trying to collect more internally
18. Twitter is hiring
    1. Pretty much everywhere

Automattic built the wonderful Prologue theme for WordPress which turns it into a private Twitter. Coming soon is Prologue Projects, a powerful yet lightweight project-management/monitoring version of the Prologue theme. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could use existing Twitter-tools on a system using one of these themes? Let’s do that.

It seems like it wouldn’t really be all that big of a task to write a layer (implemented as a plugin and/or theme) for WordPress which walked and talked like the Twitter API, but on the backend, interfaced with WordPress. Then you’d just point your Twitter tools (which support specifying a different URL) to your WordPress install and you’re off and running. I could see it supporting the core functionality relatively easily:

• Public Timeline
• Friends Timeline (if you added the concept of friends, not that hard)
• User Timeline
• Show
• Update
• Replies — perhaps showing comments?
• Update

And what about the Search API? No problem. WordPress has a search system (although it could use some work). In fact most of this functionality would be easily achieved through a custom theme with a little bit of intelligence baked in so that it could output its data in different formats (JSON, Atom, etc) and intercept requests at certain URLs.

The big question is – what’s the point? Well… I dunno… it’d be kinda cool? Apart from being cool – this could also be a very powerful internal business tool, we’ll see where it all goes.

It’s been archived as a feature article for posterity

From: “Beau” <beau@d…>
Date: Tue Mar 9, 2004 4:00 pm
Subject: Re: [blosxom] APIs, new blogging things, etc.

Ok Steve, I’ll take a bash at some of this, since I’ve been working with blogging APIs for a couple years now in effect, I’ve come across all the ones that you’ve mentioned Someone else please fill gaps or correct me if I slip up somewhere

Ok – so, in approximate chronological order of time of appearance on the scene;

* Blogger API 1.0
- http://plant.blogger.com/api/
The original – based on XML-RPC [1] calls, gave access to most (all?) of Blogger’s original functionality, and was pretty darned easy to use. You POST an XML doc with encoded requests in it to a specific URL, and the response is another XML doc which you can then use however you like. Ev Williams of Blogger knocked this up over a couple of days apparently, and it went crazy from there – I’m still using it today in http://www.dentedreality.com.au/avantblog and it still works (usually )

* metaWebLogAPI
- http://www.xmlrpc.com/metaWeblogApi [Added 2004-07-07]
Effectively a derivative of the Blogger API (and also XML-RPC based), this one came up to support Radio, I believe Dave Weiner knocked it up, and there was some animosity between he and Ev Williams over whether they should combine to create a unified blogging API (Radio and Blogger being the big 1 at the time) or go their separate ways. I believe one of the main reasons things went this way was because Blogger didn’t need/want title field support, but Radio did,
thus the metaWebLogAPI, intended to be more universal.

* Blogger API 2.0
- http://www.blogger.com/developers/api/documentation20.html
Blogger realised that with their new versions, support from Google etc, they needed to clean up their API-act, so they started working on API 2.0. This one supports title fields and a number of other things, and is accessed via XML-RPC as well. As you can see at the URL, the draft specs were released in Feb 2003, but a couple months later, it was revoked and people were instructed not to use it, because there was no support for it and Atom (then called Echo) was going to be used in prefence… which brings us to…

* Echo… Necho… Atom API
- http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage
- http://www.atomenabled.org/
Originally called Echo, then they decided that was no good, so it was refered to as Necho (Not Echo) for a while, and finally ended up being called Atom. This one is based on a REST architecture ([2], [3]), based on [4]. The Atom API sort of duplicates the efforts of RSS, in that it presents blog data in an XML format, but it also allows you to modify that data (thus API) via
REST-style interactions, involving PUT/POST/DELETE requests. I haven’t worked all this out just yet, but I have to so that I can update a few projects of mine (namely AvantBlog [5] and webpad [6]). There is also a SOAP [7] implementation of Atom, which I assume supports all the same sort of functions (retrieving posts/blogs, updating them etc), tho I haven’t looked at that at
all, as personally I hate SOAP The idea of Atom is to provide a universal API which will be supported by all blogging systems (I believe MT and Blogger are already on board, others are likely to follow) so that we can write tools which will interop with all systems easily.

[1] http://www.xmlrpc.com/
[2] http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/FrontPage
[3] http://www.xfront.com/REST.html
[4] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm
[5] http://www.dentedreality.com.au/avantblog
[6] http://www.dentedreality.com.au/webpad
[7] http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/

Now, as for blosxom’s support for any of this mumbo jumbo – I know that sxtem [8] was written to provide Blogger API functionality for blosxom, and then you also have the atomfeed plugin [9] to provide an outgoing only (RSS-like syndication side of Atom, but not the modification side) feed for blosxom blogs. As for complete Atom API integration (allowing post editing etc via REST-calls), I’m not aware of any implementation allowing that so far, probably because the Atom spec [10] is still somewhat in flux, and even if it’s not, it’s a little hard to understand (for me at least .

[8] http://www.blosxom.com/plugins/input/sxtem.htm
[9] http://www.blosxom.com/plugins/syndication/atomfeed.htm
[10] http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/api/atom-api-spec.php

So there you have it – as far as I am aware, that’s how the playing field lies at this point in regards to blogging APIs, and I haven’t even bothered to mention Movabletype (which, incidentally, implements a mish-mash of Blogger.com API and metaWebLogAPI functionality), so we’re doing quite well The beauty of blosxom is that to some extent, it doesn’t even need any of this mumbo-jumbo – you can call FTP the blosxom API if you really want When I eventually get an Atom toolkit operational, it’ll be written in PHP and linked from my Blogger API page [11], which is the current home of a number of other PHP-based blogging classes and function libraries. Until then – I’ll keep an eye out and play Lazy-web-style in the hope that someone else will beat me to it

[11] http://dentedreality.com.au/bloggerapi/

Cheers, and I hope that sums things up for you Steve (and others)

Beau

–
Beau Lebens
Information Architect
beau@d…
Dented Reality – www.dentedreality.com.au
Information Architecture, Usability, Web Development

This problem appears to have been happening for the last couple days at least, so let’s just hope that Blogger sort it out soon. I wonder if their fancy new Atom API is going to be any more reliable?

In the meantime, sign up to the mailing list to be the first to find out when it’s available and working properly again.

Thanks to those who have emailed me to let me know that it wasn’t working