Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
One of my first programming jobs involved helping the boss make a twitter sharecropping service. I remember at some point after that project twitter made a big TOS&#x2F;API change and crippled a wave of startups at the time. I was doing something else by then but it was a good warning to not let myself ever depend too much on sharecropping; over the years I&#x27;ve seen a lot of people learn that lesson the hard way.<p>I&#x27;ve used the API since then for on-off things, but the one I&#x27;m sore about now is a little Python script I&#x27;ve had running in a nightly cronjob for years that I&#x27;ve used to make local copies of images&#x2F;videos from tweets I starred (now heart&#x27;d). It&#x27;s a simple bit of code to get all my favorites and download any new ones. (If I recall correctly you need to get all of them, because the response doesn&#x27;t necessarily give them to you in the order you liked them, so if today you like an old tweet from say 2012 you might have to paginate a while to get it in the response.) Looks like the json of all ~9800 liked tweets I build up to parse for new URLs is 1.5 MB gzipped, it&#x27;s true their API returns a lot of unnecessary extra data. Currently debating with myself whether to cobble together a new script from one of the existing scrapers (gallery-dl might be easiest), or say screw it and write some Lisp code (more stable than Python) to fire up Selenium and waste more of twitter&#x27;s bandwidth pretending to be a full browser.