With Twitter’s, let’s say, not so great, uptime record lately, I think it is time the Twitter API gets codified and Twitter clients start supporting different API endpoints.
For example, today you can already use fanfou.com instead of Twitter, which supports most of the Twitter API with mostly the same results, except it’s way more stable. The problem is that you can’t use your favourite Twitter clients to access fanfou, because they’re hardcoded to the API endpoint https://twitter.com/
.
Then there’s Twitter proxy services that just queue tweets until Twitter is reachable again. Those, too, can only be used via their web interface and not your Twitter client.
Now, imagine this: Imagine your Twitter client allowed you to define your own Twitter API endpoint. So, by default, it would point to https://twitter.com/
. But you could also write your own API proxy that would, for example, send tweets to a queue service if posting them didn’t work, that would cache your replies and direct messages so all your clients could access them without counting towards the API limit, etc.
You’d just write a handler in your favourite language and point your Twitter client at it: if I set the endpoint to http://moeffju.net/twitter-proxy/
, the client would fetch direct messages by polling http://moeffju.net/twitter-proxy/direct_messages.json
. Or you could pass through everything, but merge Summize results into the /replies
feed.
Or you could simply set the endpoint to http://fanfou.com/
and instantly turn your Twitter client into a Fanfou client.
I would further suggest to extend the Twitter API with a public function to query available methods, but as a basic first step, please, Twitter clients, allow me to define my own endpoint base URL.