Apparently Twitter’s restrictions involving usage limits implemented early July 2023 have also broken an important feature that allows web designers to embed Twitter timelines and embed Twitter lists.
There several CARDINAL NEWS pages with embedded Twitter timelines and embedded Twitter lists, and we are waiting to see if the broken feature is truly only a temporary condition.
News websites, government websites and other website for many years have been able to feature their own Twitter timelines, or combine Twitter timelines in a single list to deliver effective information.
A local government website might embed their own official Twitter timeline on their official website to encourage following of their Twitter account by citizens. Embedding the Twitter timeline also provides a speedy means for a local government to provide updates regarding traffic conditions, road closures, major crimes, etc. that affect the community.
In another example, a news website might embed the National Weather Service tornado warning alerts timeline from @NWSTornado. This use provides an easy method for providing live information about Tornado Warnings from the National Weather Service automatically.
Unfortunately, since June 2023, all of these embedded timelines are broken. In place of a timeline of Tweets, viewers see an incoherent message, “Nothing to see here – yet. When anyone in this list Tweets, they’ll show up here.” That’s a standard message that is useful if a new account doesn’t have any Tweets yet, but in this case, Twitter is serving an inaccurate, incoherent message, because this message is being served even when there are Tweets. Users just can’t see them in the embedded frame anymore. If a user selects the “View on Twitter” button, the user will be referred to Twitter.com and will be able to see the timeline or list of Tweets.
The broken embedded timelines appeared around the time when Twitter announced Rate Limits on July 4, 2023.
Web designers and publishers create these embedded timelines and lists at configuration page at publish.twitter.com. There has been no alerts, notices or referrals to information regarding the issue of the broken items on the publish.twitter.com page.
Twitter provided the following explanation for limiting usage.
To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.
At a high level, we are working to prevent these accounts from 1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and 2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways.
Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete. As it relates to our customers, effects on advertising have been minimal.
While this work will never be done, we’re all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone.
At times, even for a brief moment, you must slow down to speed up.
We appreciate your patience.
In addition, in March 2023, Twitter launched Twitter API access tiers, which broke Twitter feeds in some commercial situations, unless commercial entities paid new fees. Part of the reasoning seems to be that Elon Musk wants people reading Tweets on Twitter, and wants customers to pay if they want to automate feeding of Tweets into a collection outside of the Twitter platform. Several commercial companies decided to deprecate features for their customers that used Twitter’s API, instead of paying Twitter for API capabilities.
Unfortunately, around the time of the API access change, embedded timelines and Twitter lists slowed down. In other words, the elapsed times it took for timelines to appear in some circumstance were painfully slow.
Because of the slow timelines, CARDINAL NEWS removed all Twitter timelines from the front page of Arlingtoncardinal.com, and in the sidebar that appeared on all pages (The sidebar appears at the bottom on mobile devices). Timelines remained on inner special information pages, but it was intolerable to have the front page of Arlingtoncardinal.com take from about 11 seconds to 18 seconds to fully load — because of the slow embedded Twitter timelines.
If Twitter doesn’t re-establish embedded timelines and lists, CARDINAL NEWS will re-design m.arlingtoncardinal.com (CARDINAL.NEWS)