Twitter adds delegation to API via “contributors”

Over the past week, I’ve been building a somewhat comical, if complex, application in Rails. It’s a “contextual game” that’s still a bit secret (only because it’s still in very early development and pretty much always borked.)

Today, while exploring the Twitter API and building out a more complex user model, I found an interesting attribute called “contributors_enabled” that was set to false in my user account. I immediately got excited, because this could only mean one thing: Delegation.

I quickly ran over to the Twitter API Wiki to see if my dreams could be true, and sure enough:

Contributors:

• If there are now contributors for a status, then there will be an empty <contributors/> or “contributors”  :  {}.  This field will only be populated if the user has contributors enabled on his or her account — this is a beta feature that is not yet generally available to all.
• This object contains an array of user IDs for users who have contributed to this status (an example of a status that has been contributed to is this one). In practice, there is usually only one ID in this array. The XML renders as such <contributors><user_id>8285392</user_id></contributors>, and the JSON renders as such “contributors”:[8285392].

One of the problems with having a business or group Twitter account is that everyone has to check it and post to it, or ONE person has to do that (in which case, why have it). There’ve been any number of solutions to this problem, but they are all working around the fundamental lack of delegation.

With email accounts, you can allow other people to send email from your account. This happens if, say, you’re a super important business person with a secretary… or if you’re less important, but need multiple people to send mail from a specific account.

Until now (or, rather, until “soon from now hopefully”) you haven’t been able to do that with Twitter. It looks like they are implementing that functionality, as is shown in the example.

This is good news for folks who have group accounts, like my own RubyGorge, which would be aided by having multiple people allow contributions from that account. Way to go Twitter!

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