Twitter Widget

Unusually for the tech industry, everyone knows about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter earlier this year. Less well known are the changes that have taken place since then - some obvious to end users but many less so. Unfortunately we now have to bring news that one of Twitter's changes will affect your Xibo digital signage where it connects to Twitter.

Retiring the Twitter Standard API

Since we first released our Twitter widget, Xibo has used the Standard 1.1 API, which grants each API key read access to the “search” endpoint up to 180,000,000 tweets per month. This API is being retired:

Twitter: “Over the next 30 days, we will deprecate current access tiers such as Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2), Elevated (v2), and Premium so we recommend that you migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible for a smooth transition.”

Paid-for read access

Twitter has decided to make all read-access to Tweets a commercial paid-for API, starting at 10,000 searches/month “Basic access” for Hobbyists. Full details of the changes and pricing information can be found in the embedded tweet thread below.

Twitter: “We are also launching a new Basic (v2) access for hobbyists with 10,000 GET/month and 50,000 POST/month, 2 app IDs, and Login with Twitter for $100/month.”

What does this mean for Xibo users with Twitter widgets?

These changes mean that your Xibo Twitter / Twitter Metro widgets on Cloud and self-hosted CMS instances will cease to function at some point in the next 30 days.

We do not believe that many of our users will pay $100/month for access to Twitter data, and, we do not believe the $100/month tier provides sufficient access for us to serve all of our users' Tweets via a central application and costs could be substantially higher based on new Twitter pricing.

As Twitter makes further announcements we will re-assess the options for Xibo to make use of.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience this will cause.

Other Social Media

In response to recent announcements from Twitter, we are finalising development on a Mastodon Widget for Xibo, which will be ready in time for the release of version 4.0.0. We will also reopen the projects for Instagram and Facebook.

The full details from Twitter are available below:

Today we are launching our new Twitter API access tiers! We’re excited to share more details about our self-serve access. 🧵

— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) March 29, 2023