My friend Alex Hillman sent me an IM yesterday:
"hey, i think twitter might have switched something up on you, on your blog your twitters are there but the time isnt"
After doing a little sniffing around I’ve found that Twitter has indeed updated their JSON output for my personal timeline on Twitter and removed the ‘relative_created_at’ values (which would show things like "3 hours ago" on a specific status). My best guess is that by ripping out this value Twitter is saving themselves an immense amount of calculations on their end. They still provide you with the date and time that a particular status was stored, so you can still do the math on your end.
I am not sure when they will make this public, or if they are still making subtle changes like this and want to make one update to cover all of the adjustments they are making but I thought I’d give everyone a heads up that might be using Twitter’s JSON output(s) to show status on their respective sites or applications.
Update April 5, 2007: Twitter has announced API updates as well as written up documentation for their API.
[tags]twitter, api, json, update[/tags]
[slug]twitter-json-update[/slug]
