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V2 API |
Twitter has just released Early Access to a new version of its API to academic researchers. Twitter’s v2 is cleaner and easier to use, with leaner JSONs allowing the user to manipulate the data to fit their needs. With a new developer portal and onboarding wizard, users can manage Apps and interact with the API to track usage and limits. Access to v2 includes “conversation threading, poll results in Tweets, pinned Tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language”1. Like v1.1, it supports streaming tweets in real time and tweets in the past. Unlike v1.1, v2 comes with the ability to collect data from the full history of Tweets, dating back to Twitter’s first launch in 2006, and to do so at no cost 2. This is perhaps the most important update to the API’s capabilities concerning academic research.
While v2 is still in the development phase, Twitter is providing a roadmap, and continued use of v1.1. Eventually, they hope to replace v1.1 with v2, at which point v1.1 will no longer be accessible. Getting involved from the beginning will allow academic researchers to provide feedback and ideas about the new API; and to familiarize themselves with an inevitable migration.
The launch of v2 brought with it an updated version of twarc: twarc2. Given the leaner JSONs, the responsibility fell more on the users to collect the tweet information they wanted. As such, twarc2 requests "all possible expansions and field combinations for tweets" 2, giving fuller metadata for each Tweet. Although the expansions can still be edited by the user to fit their needs, this removes the task of having to adjust search queries every time. There are many individual improvements twarc2 has made to the program (which can be read about on the twarc2 doc now page, but one of the useful is the introduction of plugins. twarc required the user to either download or clone the respository in order to interact with and use the utilities that performed the core analysis of twitter data. While this kept twarc lean, it caused issues with the functionality of some individual utilities. The plugins in twarc2 will allow users to directly install the utilities. Luckily, all of the utilities from twarc will be available in twarc2 with more to come as the project continues developing.
- The guide to Early Access.
- Getting started on the v2 Academic Reasearch track.
- Migrating from v1.1 to v2.
- The Verge article on v2.
- Examples of academic research being done with v2.
1. See Ian Cairns and Priyanka Sheety's 'Introducing a new and improved Twitter API' about the devlopement and launch of v2. ↩
2. See Ed Summers' 'twarc2' DocNow medium piece about v2 and the adaptations of twarc2. ↩