User name changes are fairly rare, but a real concern nonetheless. A cache with an expiry of a day should be sufficient to guarantee most of your cache hits are successful and valid.
Doug @dougw On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 1:26 PM, TjL <luo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Nick Arnett <nick.arn...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Question for the folks at Twitter - any stats on how often people >> change their screen names? In another thread, we were talking about >> the problem of resolving IDs to names... I'm refreshing my user data >> for lots of users every few days, in large part to catch screen name >> changes. I could start keeping track of the changes, but I have not >> done so yet. > > Excellent question, I was just wondering that myself. > >> Intuition suggests that users would rarely change their screen names, >> especially if they are active. Do you have any data to support this? > > Anecdotally, I've seen a few-but-rare name changes in the people I > follow on Twitter. > > >> Come to think of it, an API call that would give us names changed >> since a certain date would be very useful for avoiding the need to >> check everybody. Even better, return friend or follower names changed >> since a date. > > Seems like the former would be easier to provide than the latter. > > It'd be nice if Twitter.com would redirect names (i.e. if you go to > http://twitter.com/foo it would tell you/direct you to > http://twitter.com/bar) for awhile too, but that's another issue and > possibly more hassle than it's worth. > > TjL > -- Doug Williams do...@igudo.com http://www.igudo.com
