Anatomy of a Tweet

I realize that this has been making the rounds but I found it yesterday in a post by Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb and as an ex-developer (including a Windows desktop client for Twitter) I found it fascinating to look over. However it was really as interesting as something else Sarah mentioned in her post

Now for anyone not a developer, especially a Twitter platform developer, this might be a good to check out some of the other posts here because I’m about to devolve into geek speak – you’ve been forewarned.

The root of Twitter that all developers can access is their fabulous API which in the beginning was provided either as an XML or a JSON file. It was then up to the developer to parse that file and work whatever magic they wanted on it.

Well according to Sarah’s post Twitter will only be making their stream available via a JSON file as of version 2 of their API.

Via a weekend post on Krikorian’s blog, there comes an embedded document that shows what a mapped out tweet looks like. He says he decided to do this map using “JSON as opposed to XML” since the company is “considering not supporting XML on v2 of the API.” That may mean nothing to everyday Twitter users, but it’s important information for developers to take note of.

Now I’m not sure of the number of developers using the XML version of the API (I know I did when developing) but obviously this would be a good time to start moving whatever projects you are working on over to the JSON format. Not having used the JSON format myself I’m not sure of how much of a re-write this will be for developers but it definitely won’t be something that one can do overnight I imageine.