Twitter breaking API rule #1
Rule #1 when you publish an API - if you change how it works, warn people ahead of time or at the very least: add the change to the changelog or api blog!
Twitter recently silently disabled the ability for API users to find friends on twitter based on friends’ email addresses.
I wasn’t too happy about this because I wrote a tool to find friends on twitter so that I wouldn’t have to give Twitter access to my gmail account. I published that tool earlier, so if you are wondering why it is broken, this is why.
Also bad: the broken call returns success instead of an error response, so even though I wrote error handling code in case of Twitter server errors, my code to handle stuff breaking broke :(
To be fair to Twitter, I realize that their job to keep spam off their system is enormous, and many competing services don’t offer as comprehensive and simple API as they do.
Still, if you already have someone’s email address, it doesn’t seem like too much of a violation to know their twitter account. The real bad guys will probably just adapt by end-running this: adding email contacts to fake gmail accounts and then using the gmail contacts lookup, so in the end only the legitimate developers wind up losing.
