Twitter opens reverse chronological home timeline to app developers

Entangled in a bitter takeover battle with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter is giving third-party app developers more access to its reverse chronological timeline, to enable them to retrieve the most recent Tweets and Retweets posted by the authenticated user and the accounts they follow.

In an update, the micro-blogging platform said the reverse-chronological home timeline is now available on the Twitter application programming interface (API) v2.

"This functionality is important to numerous developer use-cases and we will continue to prioritise innovation and functionality that allows you to build with the core elements of the Twitter experience," the company said late on Friday.

Twitter API v2 is an interface that developers use to get data from the platform.

"The increased rate and pagination Tweet limits of v2 are going to be a noticeable benefit for our users. Given how crucial this call is, it really underscores Twitter's continuing commitment to modernising their API," said Paul Haddad, one of Tweetbot's developers.

All developers building with the Twitter API v2 can begin using the new endpoints right away, said Twitter.

"Using Tweet annotations and reverse chronological home timeline, you can build an application that shows you many Tweets per top topic you have in your home timeline based on each Tweet's annotations," said the company.