An update on Twitter and Aiir
I’d like to share an update on Twitter functionality in Aiir’s products and services.
In February I wrote about the changes that Twitter had announced which could soon affect Aiir. But at the time many things were still unclear; specifically the limitations that would be introduced and new pricing tiers.
On March 30th, Twitter announced three new tiers:
- Free, which is too restrictive for Aiir’s usage
- “Basic” — which would support all of Aiir’s use-cases, but apply much more restrictive limits than we currently work with, which could hamper our ability to continue all of the functionality
- “Enterprise” — which offers higher levels of access on a bespoke basis
Basic is charged at $100 per month, a cost we decided could be absorbed, however the limitations concerned us.
Enterprise is widely reported to start at $42,000 per month.
420 times the cost.
It isn’t feasible for us to absorb that cost, nor do we feel it would be appropriate to pass this extremely high cost on to our customers.
We’re not alone in this predicament, and many companies have announced they’ll no longer be integrating with Twitter, some particularly of note.
As part of Twitter’s announcement, they mentioned that over the next 30 days they would “deprecate current access tiers” and encouraged people to “migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible”.
In the hope of avoiding sudden disruption to our services, we made that leap last week, switching to the “Basic” tier. But from that moment, we have experienced heavy rate limiting, which has meant the pulling of tweets into Studio Inbox columns has stopped working.
It’s clear that our usage across Studio Inbox and PlayoutONE will persistently breach the new limits enforced by Twitter, and with Enterprise not being an option, we have no choice but to reach an unfortunate and immediate outcome.
Studio Inbox no longer supports Twitter, either for viewing tweets and mentions, or searching for keywords in a column. We will shortly remove all existing Twitter functionality, so you may be left with empty columns in your workspaces.
PlayoutONE will also discontinue Twitter integration.
For now, we’ll be leaving Twitter functionality in Aiir’s Social Publisher, for as long as it continues to function within the “Basic” tier. But there are clearly no guarantees on this, so that may also have to be discontinued with little notice, should it prove to not work reliably.
I’d like to reiterate my sentiment from the first blog post on this issue. I hold out hope that Twitter will have a change of heart on this. My intention is that we’ll leave our Twitter functionality dormant in Studio Inbox and PlayoutONE, so that should things change at any point in future, we’ll have the option of restoring it. Here’s hoping.
Lastly and most importantly, we’re really sorry it’s come to this, and for the disruption it causes. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us — support@aiir.com
Gav Richards
CTO, Aiir
