In a completely unlikely exchange, the owner of the Pepito the cat account, who tweets a video every time Pepito comes in or leaves his house, managed to convince Elon Musk of the usefulness of the free API. Elon Musk has pledged to spare accounts with “good content”.
A cat that saves thousands of volunteers, that’s also Twitter. On February 2, Elon Musk announced his intention to kill the free tool that automates actions on the social network. Convinced that Twitter must be paying, the billionaire intends to offer a new subscription at 100 dollars per month so that professionals can automatically tweet content or massively analyze tweets in order to draw statistics. An announcement that does not really reassure about the future of Twitter, many popular accounts based on this system. Since the volunteers running them don’t all have sufficient income, many are at risk of disappearing overnight, much like third-party clients like Tweetbot or Twitterific.
The day after this announcement, a completely improbable exchange changed Elon Musk’s mind. PepitoTheCat, a popular account that tweets a video of a cat every time it enters or leaves its house, has announced that it will not survive if the API becomes paid. Concerned by the question, Elon Musk said he wondered about a way to keep a share of free for certain accounts. Two days later he did.
Pepito saves Twitter, but under what conditions?
Two days after his first response, without a follow-up, Elon Musk returned to his conversation with Pepito on his own. “In response to feedback, Twitter will offer a lightweight, write-only API for bots that provide great free content. » That is, some automated accounts are saved. The API used by Pepito will be more restricted than the old one (no access to Twitter content), but the account will be able to continue tweeting. Ironically, this free API should also make possible the existence of accounts like ElonJet — which tweets the location of Elon Musk’s private jet.
It remains to be seen how Elon Musk will implement this change. Will this free version of the API be available to everyone? Or will it be form-based and restricted to existing accounts? Since Elon Musk says he wants to hunt fake accounts, it is likely that such a tool is not accessible to everyone. In this case, thousands of accounts could still die in the next few days.
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