Only Verified Twitter users will be able to use TweetDeck from August [Update]

Update: Twitter Support has announced that you'll need to pay to use TweetDeck in 30 days. It said users will need a Verified account.

Anyone that uses TweetDeck will now be migrated over to the newer TweetDeck preview soon. According to a Twitter employee, the company is now “working on migrating everyone to the preview version".

The reason for the migration is that the legacy TweetDeck relied on legacy APIs which have now been removed to prevent data scraping. The rate limiting that was implemented recently only affects the current APIs which are only used by Twitter Web and the preview version of TweetDeck.

While the changeover could be a headache for TweetDeck legacy users, the company is working hard to add more functionality to the preview version to make it as capable as the legacy version. Anyone can chime in with feedback on a new Twitter community for TweetDeck.

This move is just the latest in a saga that has been running since last week. Things started getting weird on Friday when Twitter bounced all non-users to the homepage to stop data scraping.

This was followed up on Saturday with restrictions on the number of tweets users could read each day. This limit has since been extended several times but still remains in place as a so-called temporary measure.

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, one of his priorities has been to save the company financially. It has included laying off about half of the company’s staff, introducing Twitter Blue, and charging $42,000 for API access - something coveted by companies looking for generative AI training data.

While Twitter is busy reorienting itself under Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino, competitors such as Meta’s Threads, Jay Graber’s Bluesky, and Mastodon will continue to try and steal away Twitter’s users. It'll definitely be interesting to see how things unfold among them.

Source: Twitter via The Verge