Twitter API ideas

I am tinkering with Twitter and working on something which uses the API, here's some ideas for further API enhancements:

• Adopt an authentication model like Flickr's for 3^rd party agents so that users can permit an agent to have access to their information or act on their behalf without having to have the user's userid and password passed to the 3rd party.
• Add a method to retrieve and set a user's location. For bonus points, a method to retrieve any user's location information (or at least users who are your "friends" or "favorites"). This information is already exposed in the datastream returned from http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml.
• Add a method to retrieve only the updates for a given user, or at least only "my" updates.
• Add a method to retrieve updates since a given time.
• Add a method to add, remove, and forget friends (though I realize this could be horribly abused, so maybe not a great idea).

I noticed one glitch while destroying the design of my twitter page: you can change the link color, and allegedly the background color, but the background color change does not apply to all relevant elements, while the link color affects all text elements. So for example you could set the link color to white and the background to black but certain fields will retain a background color of white and thus all links will become invisible.

I previously wrote about twitter in Twittering.

Posted in Twitter