API v1 is retired, old timeline widgets are no-longer rendered

[Moogligoo]

HELP! I’m trying to generate a new Widget to replace the (now redundant) one on our SharePoint intranet but when I go to create it I can’t see a preview at all and all it shows on the site is my @Moogligoo link - are there problems with the new widget or am I doing something wrong?

[philCheese]

I just cannot understand Twitter’s decision here. It’s thoughtless, ham-fisted and short-sighted. I imagine designers/developers will be moving away or switching off Twitter feeds in their droves. Was this the intention? I, for one, will not be recommending Twitter to my clients again.

Broken sites and retrograde steps when everything was working fine just boggles the mind, what a waste of my time. Total and utter BS.

+1 for turning the v1 API back on, I’m not fussed if it’s ‘supported’. I don’t care how much notice you give people, you’ve replaced something decent and open with something rubbish and constrictive. Jeez.

It might have been worth putting some thought in about the people who actually disseminate your product: people like me, the little guys who don’t have the time or money to go through every one of my sites that uses a Twitter feed and re-implement everything because of daft business decisions. No-one, in the present economic climate, is going to pay me to do that. You’re not living in the real world, you’re in some weird technological ivory tower.

And finally, can you deal with my irritated clients for me? Thought not.

Goodbye, Twitter. It used to be nice knowing you.

[biellebrunner]

You are aware that what you call “customization” is a total joke, right?
What an enormous step back, that basically ruins a totally new layout on one of my websites.
That’s just great, Twitter. You really made people’s lives easier…

[SwanieKathy]

Message to the current Twitter developers: Have You Completely Lost Your Minds!

If you are insisting on taking away flexible styling, could you at least allow us to turn off avatars with the ‘avatars: false’ attribute. Many of my sites look ridiculous now with those repetitive avatars showing up on every tweet and wasting valuable real estate. One third of the tweet space on some sites is now wasted for the avatar, which should be easy to turn off if you developers were thinking even a little. Go back to the drawing board kids.

[lsces]

Nobody seems to have thought about the problem of ‘users’ who have no idea what widgets are!!!
I should not have to ask a customer for their password so I can restore something that was working fine WITHOUT my having to know that !!!
And YES the fact that many of my customers sites no longer have twitter feeds working was something of a surprise! Since THEIR clients have the option to disable ‘social media’ it was not initially obvious that TWITTER was switching them off. AT LEAST DISPLAY SOMETHING rather than just hiding the message!
This is yet another example of the crass waste of time that stupid and unnecessary changes cause. Are TWITTER going to pay to rework all the customer sites I now have to redo?

[NezarFouad]

This is the stupidest BS i’ve ever seen… You just broke thousands of websites!!! who’s gonna go an fix all these websites???

[DavidRXV]

“support for our old embedded timeline widget (sometimes referred to as the ‘legacy timeline widget’, or ‘goodies widget’) has ended”. I have been using that widget on my home page for a long time now. It’s nice to know there is no replacement, no consideration for adapting it to a version or anything. So, thank you for that.

If that is the case, then my activity, support, usage, membership on Twitter has ended.

[Knowledgi]

Agree. I’d love to use the same font and size as my website. And the inability to remove the pictorial icons give me a great incentive to move Twitter to somewhere less prominent.

[stephentruex]

In case anyone is interested, I got my new embedded timeline to work in Expression Engine simply by moving the embed code into a Template, as opposed to an Entry. I think it was an issue with the TinyMCE Module, which does remove any tags. I’m surprised that my implementation of the old widget worked.

In theory, it shouldn’t be much more than an inconvenience to make this update, just create the new code snippet and swap it out. Whether it actually works that way for people using various CMS and different plugins or modules is another story.

[benward]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks very much for debugging the issue. From your previous post, the issue is that the data-widget-id attribute was being stripped by the editor, which is required for the widget to operate. I’m glad you managed to find a workaround. We’ll look into ways of making the widget work better in editor and filtered environments.

Ben

[stacia_jones_]

Unfortunately, I don’t think PhilCheese above is correct – the v1 API still doesn’t work, and I was forced to go to the updated version on my webpage today. Frankly, it stinks. I know the trend for years has been to change products for the worse and ignore people who complain, because new users will come along, people who had no idea how the product USED to work, and make up for the people you lost when you downgraded. So I have no illusion that anyone at Twitter is going to listen to the myriad complaints on this page.

But this is one ugly widget. I was able to configure the width on the last one, which had some nice borders and features on it as well. Now I have this really ugly, narrow, scrollbar-heavy widget with terrible link colors – the option to change link colors doesn’t even work! Come ON! So my choice is ugly or nothing… and I’ll have to go with nothing, to be honest.

[AbbeyGymClub]

We used Twitter to update news items, and then used the V1 API to show the Tweet-text only as seperate items on the “News” page of our website. This was customised with CSS to match the rest of the site - and it was great and easy.

Now we have to display avatars, retweet etc etc in a form that Twitter wants, not what we (who wrote the Tweets) want.

Forget it I’ll have to go to a less efficient method of updating the news, and I think we’ll drop Twitter

[Benmacer]

It seems that mister Ward is not going to reply to any questions about the styling problem we now face, it is always the same you help them to get big and then you can go f* yourself.
The developers of website’s made you what you are today.
And i know what you are thinking just don’t reply then they will shut up. well maybe you are right but look at yourself you have probably turned in to the person you diddn’t want to be.

I will advise all my clients to stop using twitter and look for something else that probably will have the same cycle of listening to people who help them to get big and go there own way to make more money.

[philCheese]

I think you might have got the wrong end of the stick. I’m fully aware the v1 isn’t working, hence my barrage of commets on these forums. +1 for turning it BACK ON though. This new one is NOT v1.1 anyway - that’s a joke. This is v2 as far as I can see, the change is at least a whole version jump (backwards, maybe it should be v0). It is ugly. They are having, as we say in the UK, a laugh.

[philCheese]

So, yet again, money and business concerns have overtaken/overridden/overshadowed the fact that users are at the end of the technology chain. That’s tech 101, surely. If it doesn’t work for your users then it doesn’t work. Technology minus users = some bits and bytes. Users don’t care about bell and whistles, on the ground they just want something that works and is hassle-free. Users might consume your new features, but they would have undoubtedly been perfectly happy without them.

In my 12 years experience as a technology professional, I still fail to understand why tech companies like Twitter insist on shooting themselves in the foot and then have to back-up to try to re-gain the advantage. Some longer term thinking is needed. You are the flavour of the month now, but how to make that last? In the scramble to make money and increase market share, justify new appointments with their incumbent, overblown salaries and bonuses, plus the frankly crazy idea that any change is good, the quality of the product decreases. Vision-less, short term thinking ensues. The old users get sidelined and my world becomes a less pleasant place to live and work in, all in the name of advancement.

This particular example is a retrograde step for 1000s upon 1000s of sites. If you’re going to upgrade, then upgrade for the benefit of your current users - give them a choice. Those users who have been loyal to you thus far are your lifeblood. You can also satisfy new users - It takes a little more time and thinking outside of the screen and boardroom. And some communication with the people who USE and disseminate your product. Then move on to the formulation of an all-user-centred plan.

Leave the old users behind and you are painting yourself into a smaller and smaller corner. Your ‘new’ users will become your old users and how long can that cycle go on? In time you will have alienated everyone who thought you were valuable and they will move to another service which takes their needs into account more. It’s severely short-term thinking that WILL bite you on the behind.

[Warrenclaflin]

I don’t often post on these forums, but I’m now recommending that my clients don’t use twitter feeds on their websites. It makes a good website look terrible.

Claiming that it is “customizable” is insulting to everyone and shows that Twitter doesn’t know, or care, how it’s feeds are being used.

I guess Twitter want’s to follow facebook off the cliff by alienating it’s users.

[WebDesignPrint]

This is even better than Microsoft’s XBox One farse, which they at least finally acknowledged and are taking the DRM issue back.
You could not have done the API upgrade in any worse way. I will now strongly discourage my clients from using Twitter, just the opposite to what I used to do.

[DAMRacing]

We have a network of area franchises in our business, each with their own Twitter feed which they update. We previously had the feed added to their area website by using standard code and dropping in the account name dynamically. To replace this, it seems I’d have to individually log in to each of their accounts, create and set up a widget and then drop that code into each site? No thanks! They’ll have to live without it for a while, and when we find time to amend the sites, we’ll probably go with a straight link to the account insetad of a feed.

It’s ok though, the Facebook widgets still work fine…

[robbsala]

Just last week we released client-side configuration options for Embedded Timelines ([node:18411]). This should make the use case you described much easier.

[tlnet_elesson]

I have followed your advice and moved the jscript to the main joomla 1.5 template on my site.
Unfortunately Tinymce is stripping the data-widget-id.
I’m attempting to use an html block on the home page to embed the twitter timeline but don’t know where I can try and put the id.
I’ve tried adjusting blacklist/whitelist settings too.

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