In the early days of Twitter, when it began to become popular, there was a more than interesting outbreak of products and services offered by third-party companies but directly related to the social network. Many of them were somewhat ephemeral, some because their usefulness was questionable, others because they did not have a profitable business model, and others because, with its evolution, the social network came to include the functions they provided. Those were interesting times, really.
From those early days, however, something that has lasted until today, and in very good health, are third-party clients, that is, applications or services that you can use to access and manage your Twitter account. There are many reasons to use applications or services of this type, such as being able to schedule publications, simultaneously manage multiple accounts, integrate additional functions and services from other third parties… in short, the list is quite long and yes, indeed, it makes them especially useful for social media professionals.
What makes them even more interesting, if possible, is that many of them also allow you to simultaneously manage profiles from other social networks. In this way, if a community manager manages a company’s accounts on four or five networks, they can do it from a single control center, unify messages, check responses to posts on all networks at a glance, and so on.
For this reason, when these applications stopped being able to access the service at the end of this week, many professionals raised their hands to their heads and, after wondering what was happening, many came to the conclusion that it must be related to the deficit of engineers that the company experiences after the successive batches of massive layoffs carried out by Elon Musk. “Something must have broken and nobody knows how to fix it” could be the summary of the most general opinion.
However, and as we can read in The Information, blocking third-party applications from accessing the Twitter API is intentional, as published by an engineer on the company’s Slack. There has not yet been any official statement in this regard, neither by the Twitter accounts (remember that Elon Musk fired all the communication teams) nor by Musk himself, despite the fact that he is always quite given to posting tweets. counting what happens in the social network and the changes that are taking place.
Thus, now the big question is whether this blockade is temporary, either due to technical adjustments or because the social network is thinking of modifying the legal terms for its use or, what would be more worrying, that the new CEO, who despite promised to do so, has not resigned yet, has decided that he wants Twitter accounts to be usable only directly through its official clients and web interface.
