Twitter has officially launched its API v2, which is now Twitter's primary API, bringing support for a number of new features, including Spaces, posting polls in Tweets, pinning and unpinning Lists, and more. Twitter has also updated its Developer Policy to make it more flexible.
Twitter has been working on the new API for over one year with the aim to improve and extend what developers can do within their apps. The new API includes for example over 50 endpoints to analyze how people engage in conversations, as well as endpoints to hide replies, to create polls or tag people, to get a list of people who liked a given post, and more.
The new API also includes a new top-level resource enabling to work with Spaces, Twitter's feature to handle live audio conversations. Spaces are public by default and can be created using Twitter's iOS and Android apps but not yet from the browser. The new Spaces API makes it possible to discover Spaces more easily as well as to help its host measure engagement.
Spaces are a new way to communicate, and the data associated with a Space is significantly different from a Tweet; with a new resource object, you can use and select fields who only apply to Spaces, while retaining the flexibility on using expansions to return other resources (such as user objects) in the same request.
The Spaces lookup and search endpoints allow developers to retrieve up to 100 Spaces based on their ID, on their creator, or by keyword and/or status.
Twitter also improved existing endpoints to extend filtering to better find relevant historical or real-time content, to pack more detail into responses about engagement metrics and annotations.
As mentioned, Twitter has also removed a number of restrictions from its Developer Policy to make it easier for developers to create new Twitter-based solutions, including moderation, customization, curation, and so on. What is new here is Twitter understands that building solutions often requires replicating some of Twitter's core functionality and experience, which will not be flagged anymore.
With the new Twitter API v2 come new access levels, which dictate what developer can do with the API. The Essential access level, which will be interesting to most developers, includes for example the ability to retrieve up to 500k tweets per month and one app environment, while the Elevated access extends up to 2 million tweets per months and 3 app environments for development, staging, and production.
Twitter has provided a migration guide for all existing apps using its API v1.1. The old API will continue to be available, but it will only receive critical bug fixes, says Twitter.