Twitter API v2 Update Brings New Conversation Controls and Features to Track Tweets for Developers

Twitter has added new endpoints to the API v2 bringing more features for the developer community. The first expansion of API v2 involves conversation and reply controls. Developers will be able to support Twitter's newer conversation controls, like the feature that allows users to specifically choose who can reply to their tweets. Other endpoints in the new addition allow developers to track tweets from particular accounts, those mentioning a certain account, or access a list of accounts who follow a particular user. Twitter is also inviting developers to sign up for its Business beta programme.

Twitter introduced its rebuilt API v2 in June this year. The new API brought features such as conversation threading, poll results in tweets, pinned tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and improvements to stream filtering and search query language.

As noted by TechCrunch, the API expansion will add support for conversation settings introduced to Twitter. It gives users the option to allow everyone to reply, limit replies only to those they follow, or just the people mentioned in the tweet. These conversation controls are now partially supported in the new API v2, through a field in the Tweet object called reply_settings. The addition will allow developers to tell if these conversations reply settings have been enabled for a particular Tweet and who can reply. Twitter, however, says that support for these fields still has to be written and will come “in the future”.

User tweet timeline and user mention timelines are another set of endpoints introduced with the update. These endpoints can be used to collect tweets during a certain window of time. The user mention timeline endpoint also supports application-only authentication.

The new endpoints on API v2 come with some limitations — developers can only recover up to 100 tweets per request, the user tweet timeline endpoint is limited to the 3,200 most recent tweets, and the user mention timeline is limited to the 800 most recent tweets.

But Twitter says that these limitations are not permanent. In a blog post about future developments, Twitter says that it plans to offer elevated access to the Twitter API v2 sometime next year. Twitter is also planning to engage developers building businesses. Developers can access the Twitter Developer Blog to find out more about the new API and sign up for the beta programme.

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