Twitter revises strategy on data sharing for more developers

An updated version of the ‘standard’ API was supposed to launch July 16 with new data from some of Twitter’s features, like poll results and threaded conversations. But the company delayed the rollout until next week following a security breach on July 15. — Dreamstime/TNS

Twitter Inc will change the ways in which it shares tweet data with third-party developers as part of a broader push to expand its data licensing program. The new strategy was planned before a massive hacking incident upended the platform on July 15.

The social-media company has long offered three versions of its API, or application programming interface, which allows outside developers to access large numbers of public tweets for activities such as research and customer service. Twitter plans to create more free and paid versions of those offerings as a way to entice more customers to use them, including a special set of APIs specifically for researchers, the company said Thursday in a statement.