Twitter halts auto and bulk follows in latest developer guideline update

A new update from Twitter has seen the social network put an end to automatic and bulk following.

The changes, announced as part of series of updates to its guidelines for third-party developers.

Third party app developers will no longer be able to automatically make people follow the app’s Twitter account. Developers meanwhile are prohibited from building programs that follow others accounts in bulk. Hosting datasets of raw Tweets for download is also now prohibited.

Another set of changes however has seen Twitter relax some display requirements around author’s name, timestamps and permalinks. For instance, apps that display tweets in right to left languages now have explicit permission to display their profile photos on the right too. And time stamps can now appear in either time or date format.

As The Verge notes, the Twitter logo is also no longer needed on individual tweets in third-party clients.

On their own, these are minor changes, but put together it looks like they’ll make for a more pleasurable Twitter users. they could also alleviate some developer fears, which have been present since the social network began clamping down on how people used its API in mid 2012. They do however provide a whole host of new challenges for those developers to tackle.