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Twitter Adds Conversation and Reply Controls to Its Second-Generation API

Twitter announced in July the second generation of its official API to bring more features to third-party Twitter apps. The Twitter API 2 is now getting its first expansion, via conversation and reply controls.

TechCrunch reports the new API will soon offer more features for use by developers creating third-party Twitter clients. One of these features is the option to limit who can reply to your tweets, which was introduced to users in May.

On Twitter, users can opt to allow everyone to reply, or they can limit replies only to those they follow or even just the people mentioned in the tweet. These conversation controls are now partially supported in the new API as well, through a field in the Tweet object called reply_settings. The addition will allow developers to tell if the conversation reply settings have been set for a tweet, and if so, who can reply.

The filtering of tweets from specific users or mentioning specific accounts, as well as for collecting tweets during a certain time period, are two other features that are coming back to the Twitter API. Twitter told TechCrunch that these were two of the most used endpoints by developers in the past.

There will be some limitations to using the new endpoints in the Twitter v2 API. Developers can retrieve up to 100 tweets per request. The “user tweet timeline endpoint is limited to the 3200 most recent tweets, and the user mention timeline is limited to the 800 most recent tweets.”

Developers can learn more about the new API on the Twitter website. The new API is currently available in a restricted beta program. Twitter will expand the availability of the API in early 2021 and interested developers can request access to it.

(Via 9to5Mac)

Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.