And now you've changed your mind
April 30, 2009 at 11:07 PM by Dr. Drang
OK, now the Twitter people are just trying to play with my head. A week ago, when I wrote this post, setting the in_reply_to_status_id parameter to the id of another tweet would only work if the name of the author of that tweet (@username) was at the beginning of the post—even though the Twitter API documentation said that @username could be anywhere in your tweet.
Today, Twitter changed the API to allow the original author’s name to be anywhere in your tweet. But the documentation now says you have to put @username first for the in_reply_to_status_id parameter to take effect.
To be fair, the documentation page that’s in error was last updated 3 days ago, and the changes that were made were correct at the time.
So the documentation and the API regarding in_reply_to_status_id were in sync for two days. Presumably the documentation will be updated soon to reflect today’s changes. The update shouldn’t take very long—just undo the changes made three days ago.
The upshot is that Dr. Twoot’s retweeting feature now works the way it did a couple of months ago, using in_reply_to_status_id as a link to the original tweet.
