Are there any plans to include IDs of replies when returning a Tweet object?

[mattdiamond]

I’m seeing posts from 2013 asking about the ability to retrieve replies, but it seems this feature is still unavailable. Is it too taxing on the database to include reply IDs, or is there another reason they’re not available? If reply IDs can’t be included in a Tweet object, could there at least be a way to retrieve replies in a separate Search request? I know you can already search for replies to a given user, but I’m looking for replies to a given Tweet.

This would be a powerful feature and enable the creation of very interesting applications. I hope this is under consideration, as I believe Twitter is an important platform and could benefit from making this data available to API consumers.

[andypiper]

Thanks for the suggestion. There are no current plans to add this to the API, but we are aware that it is not currently as easy as many people would like to build out conversation threads.

[mattdiamond]

Thanks for the reply. “Not currently as easy as many people would like” is a bit of an understatement… without reply data, it is literally impossible for me to retrieve a branched conversation. If I had the last tweet, I could work my way backwards to retrieve a single-threaded back-and-forth reply chain, but that doesn’t give us the full complexity of a branched conversation with potentially multiple replies to a given Tweet.

Maybe Twitter doesn’t see the value of working with complex conversations, or it wants to deny developers this ability because they want to save it for an in-house project. Either way, it’s frustrating for me and any other developer that wants to work with complex conversational data.