IFTTT To Remove Twitter Triggers Due To API Constraints, Your Recipes Are Baked

Users of information gathering, aggregation and discovery service IFTTT received an email today, and it’s not good news for Twitter fans.

It seems like because of Twitter’s recent API changes, a service like IFTTT, which stores tweets in the cloud, is flat-out not allowed. We’re not sure whether Twitter reached out to IFTTT and told them to knock it off, or if this is a proactive move by the company.

Regardless, it’s kind of rough for hardcore users. The changes go into effect on September 27, and includes pulling in and re-publishing tweets to any other service. Tweeting out from IFTTT is just fine.

Here’s the full email IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets sent to users today:

In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine.

At IFTTT, first and foremost, we want to empower anyone to create connections between literally anything. We’ve still got a long way to go, and to get there we need to make sure that the types of connections that IFTTT enables are aligned with how the original creators want their tools and services to be used.

We at IFTTT are big Twitter fans and, like yourself, we’ve gotten a lot of value out of the Recipes that use Twitter Triggers. We’re sad to see them go, but remain excited to build features that work within Twitter’s new policy. Thank you for your support and for understanding these upcoming changes. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us atsupport@ifttt.com.

Linden Tibbets
IFTTT CEO

*These Twitter policy changes specifically disallow uploading Twitter Content to a “cloud based service” (Section 4A https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms) and include stricter enforcement of the Developer Display Requirements (https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements).

We’ve reached out to both IFTTT and Twitter for comment.

UPDATE: Check out this update, seems like IFTTT has been in violation for months.