Twitter Developers Documentation

The Twitter API provides the tools we need to contribute to, engage with, and analyze the conversation happening on Twitter. In our case, we need integration with the Twitter API to retrieve information about a tweet and the conversation that follows it.

The Twitter API v1.1 was launched in 2012 and enables one to post, interact, and retrieve data for resources such as Tweets, Users, Direct Messages, Lists, Trends, Media, and Places. Twitter is currently in the process of replacing this version with the Twitter API v2 which is a modern and more sustainable foundation. Early Access is now available for the first few endpoints of v2.

There was some debate on this project to decide which version to go with: A few members suggested that it is ideal to go with an API that has already been around for more than 8 years rather than use the newer version which is still being built upon and is still in Beta. But we decided to go with the newer version for a few reasons:

• Twitter considers V1.1 as legacy version and may soon deprecate the old version once enough users have migrated over to the new version.
• Twitter claims that the functionality available within Early Access is production-ready and supported for use at scale. So, this should be sufficient for our project to use this version.
• Also, since we are a project focused on learning and not building a commercial project, even if there are some stability issues with the new version, it could be a learning curve for our project members to learn to identify them and maybe even report to Twitter.

There are a few things that we need to do before starting this integration of our project with Twitter:

• Apply and receive approval for a developer account
• Create a Project on Twitter portal and connect an associated developer App
• Save the App’s API keys, generate a set of access tokens and a bearer token to authenticate endpoints
• There are a few different access tiers across two different versions of Twitter API endpoints that require different provisioning and authentication methods. We need to set up this access.

Once all this is done, we need to understand the Twitter API – understand its data dictionary, fields, expansions etc. And focus on endpoints that we will need to use in our Application.

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This Wiki was generated in response to this issue: Twitter Developers Documentation. Resources to further follow up: Twitter API Documentation