Today we’re launching the new version of our Twitter Developer Site. With over 1,000,000 registered applications and 750,000 developers building on the platform today, we needed a new home to support the Twitter community better. So, we listened to everyone and gathered your ideas. The new site enhances communication channels, offers improved reference material and documentation, and will foster better interaction for everyone who visits it.

Here are links to the new sections. It’s much cleaner and you can tell from the number of posts that its just taking off now.  However, the most important changes are to the Documentation as posted earlier. The changes are not signification enough that you will feel lost.

Sorry, you need to scroll all the way down to see the list of links. I’m going to try and fix this bug in the theme later… Or just get a new theme.

• Discussions – We need a place to talk with each other that gives us more functionality than we have now.
• Developer Blog – The new blog provides a place to learn about important API announcements, events, tips and how-tos, case studies on great apps, product insights, and more.
• Better Documentation – The docs have better structure and searchability and should feel more intuitive.
• Improved Apps Management – The new app manager has a streamlined design that provides more comprehensive information for your app.
• Enhanced Search – Powered by Apache Solr, searching the new dev.twitter.com also got a boost. We have a unified search engine with filters and expect results to be more relevant. Also, we can search the archive from our Groups mailing list.

Hi Developers,

Beginning today you may notice a new boolean field in API responses & streams containing tweets: “possibly_sensitive”. This new field will only surface when a tweet contains a link. The meaning of the field doesn’t pertain to the tweet content itself, but instead it is an indicator that the URL contained in the tweet may contain content or media identified as sensitive content. During this initial testing phase, there’s nothing you need to do with this field and the field values cannot be relied on for accuracy. In the future, we’ll have a family of additional API methods & fields for handling end-user “media settings” and possibly sensitive content.

If you’re curious how this field will ultimately be used, we recommend that you read the following user support articles:

• Twitter Media Policy: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169199
• Media Settings and Best Practices: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169200
• Flagging Media: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20069937

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns not answered by the support articles above.

Over two years ago, I talked about how Twitter’s search engine became increasingly less useful over time thanks to a shrinking index and oddities, like being unable to find any tweets from specific users, or missing data, even when search operators were used. At the time, I asked if this would be a “temporary blip” which I hoped would “come back soon”, but the company has prioritized other features. In the meantime, a deal with Google to provide realtime updates in their search results lapsed. So we’re still stuck with the few days of results, just in a prettier format.

The new Twitter Search Front End, Including Top Trends by Your Geo

In addition to the cleaner look of Twitter search, the service also has a new example pop-up for search operators. While the practically ancient “flight ” example held over from Summize remains, new are example searches including “from:alexiskold”, “to:techcrunch” and “@mashable”, nods to the GetGlue founder and top blogs who give Twitter a lot of press.

Also included? The optimistic operator: “superhero since:2010-12-27″ which says it will return results “containing “superhero” and sent since date “2010-12-27″ (year-month-day)”. If you do run that query, you’ll get responses dating back all the way to July 23, 2011. Where the rest of the 7 months’ results are is anybody’s guess.

Search Operator Options on the New Twitter Search

Despite one’s social networking preferences, the data inside Twitter is extremely valuable. The company really could have a lead on being the realtime pulse of the planet. This makes prioritizing new tweets the most important, but I’d bet the world could benefit from more than a week’s worth of content.

Change it from read & write, to read & write & direct messages.

Next you need to change a line in twitteroauth.php .

Around line 91 find the following..

function getAuthorizeURL($token, $sign_in_with_twitter = TRUE) {

Change TRUE to FALSE.

Then look for these 3 lines..

if (is_array($token)) {
$token = $token['oauth_token'];
}

Add the following line..

return $this->authorizeURL() . “?oauth_token={$token}”;

For awhile, this was not working for me till I realized that the OAuth token will be changed.  As such, I have to delete the token information out of the database each time I clear the session.  Course, this is proper practice anyway, so I was a victim of my own oversight.

Now, I just need to look for the 403 error and ask the user to clear there session and log back in again.  No fun for the user, but thats how it goes.  For those people how are using the automated processes of TwittFilter, well, I guess I will have to send an email out letting people know they have to go into TwittFilter, logout and log back in again… Sigh.. Thanks Twitter.

Well, after the book done and going to print, there was yet one more change the messed with the book.  Apple announced that support for Twitter would be build into iOS5.  Arrgg!!  We did 2 chaps on setting up a iOS dev environment, adding an oAuth xAuth lib and making a tweet.  Now with this update, we do not need to worry about oAuth x Auth.  Now there are still good thing to learn in hour 23 and 24, especially if you are new to writing for the iOS, but I would say 1/2 of the content does not matter anymore unless you are writing something custom.

Thanks Apple and Twitter.. you guys drive us nuts.

..Now, what I have learned about writing a technical book so far..

I think the greatest learning moment for me about this is writing a book sucks. When I was at UC Berkeley, I would write papers, wrote a Masters Thesis and then a Dissertation.  I never enjoyed writing, but it was something I could do once I sat down and applied myself.  Writing in your spare time is quite another thing. Add to that, some exciting things coming up this year in my current job and mind share goes down even further. So how does one address this?  Again, this is for me, I have to spend a weekend working on the book.  Not the whole weekend mind you, but an hour here and there from Friday to Sunday. I’ve found that you cannot simply sit down and bang it out. You need to think about what you are going to write, get your head into that mindspace. Some people can turn that off and on, I need to ease into it. So Sunday seems to be the most productive day, because I spend a bit of Friday and Sat thinking and researching what I’m going to write. Course, if you have one of those careers where once you leave work, you really leave it, then perhaps taking up writing might be a good idea… might be.