Twitter has released a new update of its application programming interface (API) — the code that allows software developers outside of the company to write their own applications that interact with it, and, per Twitter’s warning in June, it is much more restrictive in the terms it enforces on developers.
Specifically, the new API, which is Twitter’s first update since the website launched in 2006, limits to 100,000 the number of user “tokens,” that apps which replicate the Twitter functionality closely can distribute. The tokens are necessary to allow users of outside apps to access Twitter from within the apps.
Twitter is giving developers six months, till March 5, 2013, to upgrade their apps to the new API or be cut off from Twitter entirely.
