Back in the early days of Twitter, I noticed that several tweets I was seeing showed "via _____" next to the date, which linked to the application that was used to post the tweet. I thought "hey that's a clever way to give credit to applications" and thought it would be a good way to get people to discover the Twitter app I was creating at the time.
Of course since Twitter was still so new, there was no automatic way for this to happen. I managed to track down an email posted to the "Twitter Development Talk" mailing list where someone was asking how to do this.
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 22:39:29 -0000 From: "Ricky" <rbo...@gmail.com> To: Twitter Development Talk <twitter-deve...@googlegroups.com> Subject: How do you set the source from the API I am trying to update a status of a user via the methods on the API. I managed to update my status but it always says updated from web. I've seen other people update from facebook or whatever so I was wondering if there is a way that I can customise this label. ... Anything I can change to set the source here? Cheers
Al3x, one of the first engineers at Twitter (who was primarily focusing on building the developer platform), replied to the list:
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:43:14 -0700 From: "Alex Payne" <al...@al3x.net> To: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: How do you set the source from the API Please email me off-list and I'll set you up with a source link. Thanks. -- Alex Payne http://twitter.com/al3x
I thought "that sounds like something I can do," and proceeded to have the following email exchange with Al3x.
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:43:30 -0800 From: "Aaron Parecki" <aaron@parecki.com> To: al3x@al3x.net Subject: custom api status Hi Al3x, I happened across this page: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/e62039d65648614b and noticed you were asking people to contact you to set up a custom source link. Could you please set me up with "untied"? Thanks! Aaron Parecki
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:33:59 -0800 From: "Alex Payne" <al3x@al3x.net> To: "Aaron Parecki" <aaron@parecki.com> Subject: Re: custom api status Do you have a link for your application? -- Alex Payne http://twitter.com/al3x
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:35:25 -0800 From: "Aaron Parecki" <aaron@parecki.com> To: "Alex Payne" <al3x@al3x.net> Subject: Re: custom api status It is still in progress. http://untied.us Aaron
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:38:39 -0800 From: "Alex Payne" <al3x@al3x.net> To: "Aaron Parecki" <aaron@parecki.com> Subject: Re: custom api status Alright. Please start sending a parameter named "source" with a value of "untied" when you POST updates to our API. I'll push out the change today. -- Alex Payne http://twitter.com/al3x
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:46:00 -0800 From: "Aaron Parecki" <aaron@parecki.com> To: "Alex Payne" <al3x@al3x.net> Subject: Re: custom api status thanks!
The things I found amusing from this were:
- this was an undocumented feature that Twitter was apparently not opposed to people using
- it required a manual change on Twitter's end that required "pushing out" the change
