Twitter has updated the API used by developers to make apps in the forth coming version 1.1 of the API. New changes included authentication on every API endpoint and limiting the per endpoint rate.Currently developers do not need to use an authenticating key to access the public twitter data for use in their apps based on the micro blogging service. This has made it difficult for Twitter to know about what sort of applications are being launched and how the data is utilized. Number of authentication requests made by applications will be lowered to 60 calls per hour for each endpoint from the 350 that are making now.

Michael Sippey, Twitter’s director of consumer product, wrote on the company blog, “When we release version 1.1 of the API we will simultaneously announce the deprecation of v1.0. From the day of the release, developers will have six months to migrate applications from v1.0 to v1.1. For developers who are already making authenticated calls to the API, this migration will be relatively easy, and should only involve updating the API endpoint, and testing your application’s behavior against the new rate limiting policies.”

Apps that are of the type that mimic Twitter itself may be cut as the company is more likely to favor apps that use data for Social CRM, Social Analytics and Enterprise Clients. Newly created Twitter apps will only be allowed upto 100,000 users and while those already with more than 100,000 can double the number of users. Once the apps reach the cap then the developer will have to ask permission from Twitter to further increase their user base. The reason for these changes are to have more insight into data usage and prevent harmful use of Twitter resources by malicious apps and mobile clients. You may in the near future see some differences in your fav twitter apps or “rate limit exceeded” messages.