Several of X’s (formerly Twitter) API changes introduced earlier this year have led to Slack getting rid of the platform’s integration.
The app within Slack has not been functional since the changes, so the platform has this week decided to remove it from a small set of customer workspaces who still had it installed.
Slack is the latest to join a long line of services and platforms who have severed ties with the social media site over these changes, that were likely introduced following X CEO Elon Musk’s plan to recoup some of the site’s dwindling costs. The changes, however, have led to developers reporting that the new ‘free’ offering was unusable.
X Officially Retired on X
While X posts will continue to unfurl within Slack, if your settings allow, the Twitter app within the platform will no longer be available thanks to “upstream API limitations”. On the feature retirement’s page, X’s status is set to “retired”.
According to Slack, the integration functionality was affected too much. Slack’s VP of software engineering Rod Garcia explained “Slack’s integration with X relies on access to its API, and changes to that API this spring impacted the integration’s functionality and the services it supports”.
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Not Just Slack Cutting Out X
Slack joins the likes of Sprout Social, who last month changed several features because of a lack of API endpoint support, as well as thousands of developers who are unwilling to pay to gain access to the X/Twitter developer platform.
Earlier this year X/Twitter cut the majority of developers’ API access in order to provide paid access to different levels and versions. The cheapest starts at $42,000 a month for access to 50 million tweets, while more expensive packages can run up to $125,000 and $210,000 a month for 100 million and 200 million tweets respectively.
When asked for comment, X/Twitter’s press email auto-replied with a standard “Busy now, please check back later”, which is a small step up from the poop emoji at least.
Cutting down the free API offering is just one of the ways that X has got worse under Musk.
Cutting Ties with Musk’s Platform is Becoming More Common
Slack’s decision isn’t totally out of the blue, as it appears to be rapidly cutting ties with the platform. Only last week it announced it was retiring the Slack status account on X/Twitter, which is where it previously shared updates about issues and outages on the platform.
On this change, Kevin Albers, VP of customer experience at Slack explained “We made the decision to retire the @SlackStatus account in order to consolidate our communications around incidents and focus resources on those most widely used by our customers”.
While it’s unknown if any other API or developer-access changes are on the horizon, what’s clear is that the wild ride of X/Twitter under Musk isn’t about to let up any time soon.
