Overnight, users across Twitter began reporting that the older, and much better, version of TweetDeck has returned along with the free API access that made third party Twitter clients possible. TweetDeck was disabled last week when Twitter abruptly threw up a rate-limiting paywall and killed the legacy APIs that allowed the old version of the feature to function, while third-party apps were banned in January.
An update this morning from Harpy developer Roberto Doering says they switched to the “old v1 API” to get it working again, but they also noted “this doesn’t mean that harpy will be maintained again, seeing as Twitter will most likely shut down access to their legacy api (again) soon and third party apps are still against their TOS.”
A scan of Twitter’s official accounts, as well as those is Elon Musk and new CEO Linda Yaccarino didn’t show anyone saying anything about the old TweetDeck’s return — the Twitter Support account’s most recent tweet is the one from several days ago announcing the launch of the new TweetDeck.
Afterwards, Twitter foisted its “new, improved” TweetDeck, which has been in preview for over two years, on the world. It announced via the Twitter support account that the feature would go behind the Twitter Verified paywall for Twitter Blue subscribers and those the company deems worthy of a free blue check.
Twitter claimed its decision to limit the number of tweets its users could see in a day was a necessary, and temporary, decision caused by companies scraping its site to feed AI models.
The company is also facing its most formidable copycat with the launch of Instagram’s Threads app, which Meta rushed out the door ahead of schedule this week in a bid to take advantage of Twitter at its most vulnerable and quickly registered over 70 million accounts in less than two days. However, TweetDeck might be a feature that Threads won’t copy, as Instagram boss Adam Mosseri told Alex Heath that “Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads – they have on Instagram as well to some extent – but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.”
Update July 8th, 2023, 12:50PM ET: Updated to say that some third party apps may also now be working again.
