Remember When Using Twitter Was Fun And Easy?

Recently, Twitter released the latest update to its API (application programming interface) and completely cleared out support for the previous version. An API is a programming language that allows two different applications to interface with each other, such as displaying a list of your Tweets at a website. Since then, what was once a simple process is now a royal pain in the neck.

For example, in order to display a list of tweets from a specific account all you needed in most cases was the Twitter username or the user URL, such as @adaptistration or https://twitter.com/Adaptistration. Now users will need to jump through a myriad of hoops in order to set something like that up, all of which begins at a site you’ll love to hate in short order: https://dev.twitter.com/apps.

Officially, Twitter claims the update is to provide a more consistent user experience but that’s mostly corporate spin for offering less flexibility, higher development costs, and usage limits (not to mention an ideal way for Twitter to begin serving up ads alongside with your feed data).

All grousing aside, here’s what you need to do today: check any widgets or scripts at your organization’s website that display a Twitter feed to see if they are still functioning properly. If any of them aren’t, odds are it is because they are no longer compliant with Twitter’s API 1.1 standards.

In order to get them working again, you’ll need to find a different third party solution (or download an updated version), pay a developer to write a new version, or just find a different solution. Either way, you’ll still need to get over to time-suck central to create a Twitter app, generate access tokens and secret keys, and making sure the rest of your related OAuth settings are properly setup.