Identi.ca Implements Twitter API
When we first reported about the new microblogging service Identi.ca earlier this month, it looked like an interesting experiment. Since then, its community has grown rapidly and today, it implemented an API that is compatible with the Twitter API. Thanks to this, any application that connects to Twitter can now also work with Identi.ca by simply pointing to identi.ca/api instead of twitter.com.
Dave Winer tested the new API yesterday and reports that everything worked perfectly after he substituted the Twitter URLs with Identi.ca URLs. If this holds true for other developers as well (and we have no reason to believe otherwise), then this is a major step for Identi.ca.
Many new services struggle to build a developer community around their platform. By being compatible with Twitter, though, Identi.ca's developer pool is now virtually identical with Twitter's developer community, which means that it is only a matter of time before Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, or TweetBox will make posting to Identi.ca an option.
As Twitter is making it more and more difficult for some third-party developers to hook into its API by severely restricting the number of calls any given application can make within a certain time period, Identi.ca will probably see a lot more interest from developers in the near future.
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My 2 pennies on the identica API... It is a hack and not a full scale API. It isn't as simple as changing around a few things and apps like Twhirl working. It would be nice if the identi.ca API was a real API and not just a hack. They are just trying to get press and $$$
Hey, A.J. It is, in fact, just as simple as changing a few things around. We're working with desktop developers to make it work, and the general response has been that it's surprisingly easy.
Let me know what's not working for you, and we will get it fixed STAT.
And thanks for calling it a "hack". Where we come from, that's a big compliment!
Posted by: evan.prodromou.name
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July 18, 2008 11:21 AM
Good news for them -- we're down for any new Twitter API's :)
Very cool. Always nice to see new community based platforms. I'm interested to see what kind of apps are born from Identica + Twitter.
Frederic,
I can confirm that the identi.ca API works precisely as Dave Winer indicated... just change the URL in your Twitter app to point to 'identi.ca/api' instead of 'twitter.com' and it works beautifully. I've tested two of my apps that use the Twitter API and both "just worked". Now, I'm just doing very simple things with the Twitter API, but for those simple uses it works great. Kudos to the identi.ca team for integrating that into the open source code base.
Dan
Not fully compatible, since identi.ca counts string length in 'bytes', while twitter does in 'chars'. Post limit of 140 bytes and 140 chars are very big difference for multi-byte users.