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We’d like to notify you of some important changes to the Twitter API platform that are coming up, and to help you understand what it means.

We have postponed the retirement date of Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message endpoints, giving developers more time to use the Account Activity API and complete their migration. These services and endpoints will now be deprecated on Thursday, August 16, 2018.

Last April we announced many changes coming to our platform including replacing existing endpoints with improved versions. We’ve been steadily launching new APIs and on December 19th we announced that we would be deprecating a few services after six months. Developers using Site Streams, User Streams and legacy Direct Message endpoints have three additional months for migration, beyond the original retirement date of June 19th 2018. These services and endpoints will now be shut down on Thursday August 16, 2018.

    User Streams
    Site Streams
    GET direct_messages
    GET direct_messages/sent
    GET direct_messages/show
    POST direct_messages/new
    POST direct_messages/destroy

We have new endpoints and services available that provide similar access and, for Direct Messages, some additional functionality:

    Account Activity API enterprise and premium
    GET direct_messages/events/list
    GET direct_messages/events/show
    POST direct_messages/events/new
    POST direct_messages/events/destroy

Now that a version of the Account Activity API that delivers a full set of activities is generally available, the beta that delivered only Direct Messages will also be deprecated on August 16th, 2018.

For developers who got access to the Account Activity API beta via the developer portal, we are changing the number of subscriptions available for free to 15, down from the 35 that was available during the beta. Additionally, your beta access has automatically been upgraded to the free, premium (sandbox) Account Activity API. You will see this in the developer portal and you don’t need to change anything in your code or portal. These changes are effective today.

To help you make a smooth migration to these new endpoints and services we have two migration guides:

    Account Activity API migration guide for those going from User Streams and Site Streams to our new webhooks based service
    Direct Message migration guide for those migrating between Direct Message REST endpoints

If you are building solutions that ingest data and respond in Direct Messages we also have a Building a Customer Engagement Application on Twitter playbook.

And, finally, we have code samples to further your understanding and help you get started quickly:

    The Account Activity Dashboard is a sample Node.js web app with helper scripts to get started with the Account Activity API.
    SnowBot is a sample chatbot using the Account Activity API and REST Direct Message endpoints. It’s written in Ruby, uses the Sinatra web app framework, and is deployed on Heroku.

Over the next few months we will notify developers, on a regular cadence, about these changes:

    We plan to follow up via email with impacted developers who have not yet migrated to remind them of the upcoming changes
    On Twitter we will Tweet from @TwitterAPI and @TwitterDev on a regular basis
        Additionally, you may see promoted Tweets as we try to reach developers who are on Twitter, but not at the time we Tweet
    Our content and documentation on developer.twitter.com has been updated
    To drive additional targeted awareness to developers, we will continue to use our community forums

For follow-up questions, we encourage you to use the appropriate categories on the forums, and to add relevant tags to your postings such as directmessages, account-activity, or webhooks:

    Premium APIs
    REST APIs

Also, we’re excited to see what you build - please feel free to share any code examples and libraries that you create with the rest of the developer community!