Twitter announced on Monday that it will once again delay the launch of its new API platform and promised to release more information in the coming days.
Earlier this month, the company angered many when it announced plans to end free access to its API starting February 9th and charge anyone who wants to use it a monthly fee.
The Twitter API is a service provided to software developers and researchers that allows them to create extensions for their browsers to modify and improve website usage, to create accounts (bots) to auto-tweet or to automatically generate responses for you.
Academic researchers who rely on the service to access public tweets for analysis and research now fear having to pay to access tweets.
After the announcement of the end of free access to the API, many researchers and developers who trusted the service immediately expressed their distaste for the idea of turning it into a paid service. In response to the feedback, Twitter will provide a lightweight, writable API only for bot accounts that offer free, high-quality content.”
Although the new API platform was originally scheduled for February 9, the company has postponed the release to February 13. And now Twitter is back to announcing the launch delay, but this time it hasn't announced a new launch date.
Twitter, through its developer account, said it would delay the release of the new API platform by a few days. She says the changes coming to the platform are "very exciting".
The company added in a tweet, "As part of our efforts to create a seamless experience for our developer community, we are delaying the release of our new API platform by a few days. We will announce more information in the coming days. Thank you for your continued interest and patience."
Twitter said last week that a basic API with "low-level usage" would be available for $100 per month, but did not specify how much usage falls into the "low-level" category. The company also said that it will offer a free write-only API for 1,500 tweets per month.