Twitter Launches Spaces API for Live Audio Conversations
Twitter has updated their API V2 with Spaces lookup and discovery API endpoints for live audio conversations. Twitter hopes the launch of the Spaces API with live audio conversations will spark 3rd party app integrations and innovations that popularize Spaces.
Introduced last year, Twitter Spaces is a new way to live stream audio conversations on Twitter similar to Clubhouse or Facebook Live Audio Rooms. Twitter is one of the first major social networks to offer an official API to their live audio conversation streaming, but others networks are sure to follow.
How Spaces Works with Live Audio Conversations
Spaces is straightforward and can be access in the Twitter mobile app. You can create or schedule Spaces, add co-hosts, and listen or speak.
On Twitter for iOS and Android, when someone you follow starts or speaks in a Space, it’ll appear at the top of your timeline as a purple bubble for as long as it’s live. When you join a Space as a listener, you can react to what you hear with emojis, check out any pinned Tweets, follow along with captions, Tweet or DM the Space, or request to speak.
What the Twitter Spaces API Offers
The new API endpoints allow 3rd party apps to discovery content and creators. As Twitter states:
The new Twitter API v2 will be able to look up live or scheduled Spaces using criteria like Spaces ID, user ID, or keyword. With the Spaces lookup and Spaces search endpoints, we hope to enable developers to build tools and solutions that help people on (and off) Twitter find interesting and relevant Spaces more easily.
Specifically, the new GET endpoints are focused on lookup and discovery capabilities:
- Lookup Space by ID: GET /2/spaces/:id
- Lookup multiple Spaces by ID: GET /2/spaces
- Discover Spaces created by user ID: GET /2/spaces/by/creator_ids
These endpoints will allow you to build apps that help your users find Space and their creators.
What’s Next for the Spaces API
Twitter gave some insight into what is next for the Spaces API. They plan on introducing Space Hosts features:
- Analytics metrics, such as creating a performance dashboard.
- Creation reminders, so you can notify your users about scheduled Spaces.
Twitter usually focuses on lookup and discovery as they introduce new APIs. For example, V2 is still missing Tweet creation capabilities.
What We Hope to See Next
While lookup and discovery is an excellent start, we hope Twitter will also introduce creation PUT endpoints, such as create new Spaces, schedule a Space, or live streaming to a Space. This would open up a world of capabilities to 3rd party apps that focus on content creation.
For example, we at Ayrshare will introduce Spaces creation, scheduling and management via our API. Imagine being able to stream your user’s live audio from your platform to multiple social networks like Twitter, Clubhouse, and Facebook.
Twitter has been active with their API V2 as you can see with their roadmap, so we hope these new capabilities will be available soon.
