Worked with a couple of REST APIs today. Twitter and Trello, more specifically. Pretty cool stuff. The best tutorial I found was in Ruby, so I had to learn a bit of that.

I like Ruby.

I talked to Nathaniel about all this, and he told me why he hates authentication tokens.

Turns out.

Twitter’s API has some very specific terms related to who gets how many API tokens and for what purpose. Basically, they have an “open” API, which means it’s open to anyone who doesn’t want to compete too seriously with Twitter.

applications that attempt to replicate Twitter’s core user experience (as described in Section I.5 below) will need our permission to have more than 100,000 user tokens and are subject to additional terms.

What this means is I can’t use Nat’s favorite third party Twitter client, because they are out of keys.

Scary, unregulated world out there. Social networks kind of breed monopolies because of exponential growth or something.