Breaking: Twitter Highlights Coming Contributer API [UPDATE 1]

You cannot play with it yet, but Twitter is beginning to outline it’s Contributer API, which will make Twitter more business friendly.

Twitter’s API team states the following, in regards to the new Contributer API:

As you may have seen on our blog, we’re starting a very small test of a new feature that will allow a Twitter account to have multiple “contributors”.

This is the first in a suite of features that we’ll be rolling out specifically targeted to the needs of businesses, and this particular feature is going to allow a business to invite employees and representatives to tweet, DM, follow users, etc., on behalf of the account holder.

While this feature is not ready for prime-time, and while we’re not yet taking requests to be part of an early-access release while we work out the kinks, we’re really committed to keeping our developers in the loop. I want to give you all a heads up on what is coming on the API side, and, for this particular feature, I wanted to give you all a look at what we’re calling the “Contributor API”. The reason I want to really highlight these changes is because we’ll be making an addition to the status objects as this rolls out. [Emphasis ours]

The post goes on to highlight the coming API calls, and promises more information in the coming time. A big step for Twitter in the right direction.

Read the whole post here, if you like to code things.

– Update –

Twitter has a blog post up on the main Twitter blog which says the following:

“The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.”

Twitter points out that this allows for teams to post much more neatly, with a tweet looking like this: