IFTTT Drops Twitter Triggers Due to API Changes from 2011

IFTTT is one of the few really innovative services out there, it's designed to make everything else work together, save Twitter photos to Dropbox, get an SMS when it rains, and so on and so forth.

The possible combinations of actions, "recipes," depend only how many services are supported.

Which is where the problem lies, IFTTT depends entirely on other services and the APIs they offer. And if those services decide to clamp down on their APIs, IFTTT is left in the dark.

Yes, this is about Twitter again, the company is bent on alienating even the most devoted fans and developers. IFTTT is removing all recipes that involve grabbing tweets and sending them elsewhere.

"In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data," IFTTT wrote in an email to its users.

"As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook," it said.

"All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine," it added.

IFTTT says the changes, which refer to exporting tweets to "cloud based services," are making it impossible to continue to offer the features.

However, the portion of the Twitter API Terms of Service that refers to this, section 4A wasn't changed in the latest update.

What has changed, however, is that Twitter is stricter about enforcing its API policy. What's more, Twitter is also more specific about how tweets are supposed to be displayed by third-party services, i.e. they have to look and work exactly like they do on the site.

Neither company is commenting on the move, so it's hard to know where the truth lies. If this is about the "cloud based services" part, then IFTTT has been in violation for more than a year.