There’s been a lot of chaos over on the blue bird app this weekend, and frankly, it’s all a lot of noise I didn’t want to cover.
But buried within that is some reporting around the after-effects of recent changes that Twitter made to restrict access to its previously open API. Quoting from the Verge:
Twitter’s API service, after its changes, lets users post 1,500 tweets per month for free. Beyond that, prices can increase steeply — the hobbyist-oriented Basic tier allows users to post 3,000 tweets for $100 a month, and a “low-cost” enterprise plan could reportedly soar as high as $42,000. And for many emergency accounts, the free tier won’t be enough.
Twitter’s new restrictions, for instance, could affect InciWeb, the Forest Service’s information management system for wildfires. InciWeb tweets updates on active fires across the US. During peak fire season, when several regions of the US are simultaneously ablaze, “we could easily reach that 1,500 limit,” says Stanton Florea, a spokesperson for the National Interagency Fire Center and the US Forest Service. It could also be bad news for local fire agencies, sheriff’s departments, and 911 dispatch centers, which residents near a blaze might be more likely to follow. “I have been on [Twitter] for 15 years on some of the first very large fires where it was used in California,” Florea says. “Twitter’s just especially well suited for fire information [because of] the brevity and the economy of just being able to repeatedly send out short messages.”
There’s a space of business cases around notifications where Twitter is or was a viable platform. If you’re working with customers who leverage it in this way, from schools to governments to health organizations, I wanted to highlight this. I know I initially missed this set of use cases when considering the API changes at Twitter, and I thought listeners might have missed it too.