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]
3 Comments
That’s also happening on the xml output too so I’ll be having to update tweetyPy asap.
Stuart: Yeah, I should have mentioned that it has been changed throughout any of their public outputs. Good point.
Ah yes, this has mildly broken Twitgit as well. I was doing a crude comparison of the relative_created_at string between tweets and only outputting a ‘5 minutes ago’ header when the value changed — producing rather nicer grouping.
Thankfully JavaScript handles it in a fairly graceful way and the header now just reads ‘undefined’ followed by all 20 tweets, which sure beats the whole thing falling over.
There’s an update to Twitgit in occasional development at the moment, although the pressure’s on ’cause the Twitterific guys have pulled off a blinder with v2, and have every single feature I want in Twitgit, bar it being a widget…