Twitter reverses policy; will allow NWS to send unlimited number of automated tweets

John Robinson

John Robinson

EF1
Joined
May 10, 2007
Messages
99
Location
North Little Rock, AR
Well honestly it's not a HUGE deal - nobody watches Twitter to see if they have a tornado coming :)

But I am curious why you think it was a good idea as a blanket plan originally?
 
rdale said:
Well honestly it's not a HUGE deal - nobody watches Twitter to see if they have a tornado coming :)

But I am curious why you think it was a good idea as a blanket plan originally?
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My understanding is the original plan did not specifically target the NWS, and was intended to reduce spam traffic. It's not surprising that valuable automated services were caught up in such a "universal" policy. File under: "Law of Unintended Consequences."
 
Change of plans - this was all a joke by one of Elon's supporters. NWS will lose API access this month.
 
rdale said:
Change of plans - this was all a joke by one of Elon's supporters. NWS will lose API access this month.
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They can pay for it, of course. I think they should continue broadcasting on Twitter even if they have to subscribe (and pay for) API access. It seems worthwhile even though I don’t use Twitter myself.
 
gdlewen said:
I think they should continue broadcasting on Twitter even if they have to subscribe (and pay for) API access
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Absolutely not - that would be a MASSIVE waste of taxpayer dollars. Nobody sits on Twitter monitoring the timeline to see if they have a warning.
 
rdale said:
Absolutely not - that would be a MASSIVE waste of taxpayer dollars. Nobody sits on Twitter monitoring the timeline to see if they have a warning.
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This is precisely why I don't think it's a huge deal. Sure it's nice for those of us who like to observe events when we can't chase, but aside from that, I've never followed anything on Twitter either while I'm in the field or when I'm sitting at home waiting on storms to arrive. That's why I have radios that automatically click over when a warning is issued in my neck of the woods. My CB woke me up more than once when I was OTR when it went off for a warning (which is why I bought that particular model for my semi). I can count on one hand the number of people I know who aren't involved with weather that follow any NWS entity on social media.

I've seen a lot of people absolutely freaking out about it, and I really don't think it's as big a deal as people are making it out to be.
 
gdlewen said:
They can pay for it, of course. I think they should continue broadcasting on Twitter even if they have to subscribe (and pay for) API access. It seems worthwhile even though I don’t use Twitter myself.
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I have been caught up in this as well through my StormWindow app. The changes they are doing to their API is vast. Before the update one could read 2M tweets for free, now it is 0 on the free account. Interestingly, you can still post tweets for free (to some extent). If you pay $100/month, you can read 10k, which is virtually nothing.

The next is the enterprise level (in which NWS would have ended up in afaik), which I have heard could cost $41,000 / month or year. That is just ridiculous.

I know you can't rely on API:s like this one to stay the same forever but I never thought I would have to go from free to $41,000. Even $100 / month, if I could manage on 10k tweets, is quite a lot for a hobby application.
 
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