My Twitter stream is very busy at the moment with lots of people slating Twitter’s new rules that are managing its API use, I don’t know enough to understand the technical side of things, but I don’t understand the fallout. Users of IFTTT (If this then that) have just been informed that their Twitter triggers (actions that are carried out based on a tweet or tweet’s content) will no longer work.

This is really quite annoying, for sometime I’ve used IFTTT to spread updates around a few different social networks - it’s been great and has allowed me to be more productive. There’s only two recipes that will no longer work from September the 27th;

  • I favourite (or star) a tweet, an email gets sent to me with the tweet as the email message. This is great as I can quickly mark things as ‘read later’ - I usually mark things like articles I want to read, Youtube videos I want to watch, etc - things that will distract me from my work.
  • I include the hashtag #DJ to the end of my tweet, the content and any links included in the tweet will get posted as an update on my Facebook DJ page. I’m not a heavy user of Facebook, I very rarely visit the website or iPhone app, but I do like to have a small presence on there and I do have a few ‘fans’ from when I used to DJ a lot and this is a nice way of just updating a few people with tracks or mixes I like and want to tell people about, or when I produce a new mix of my own. This is the recipe I’m going to miss most.

This is a real shame, I’m sure Twitter have their reasons and I’m sure that the effects of these decisions are only touching a small percentage of people that use the service, but those people - call them the geeks if you will, I’d call them the early adopters - are the ones that were there from the start and/or are the ones that shout loudest about how much they love the service.

I’m wondering if other services (Google+ I’m looking at you and your lack of full read / write API) will take any advantage from this, app.net seems to be getting a lot of positive feedback - would their $50 entrance fee stop this kind of action ever happening?

I guess we’ll all just have to wait to see what Twitter have in store for us next.