Re: [twitter-dev] "Does user X follow user Y?"

[TjL]

http://doesfollow.com/rid00z/dmethvin doesn't say that he is either.
Sounds like a glitch.



On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 3:20 PM, Dave Methvin  wrote:
> Thanks, that sounds like exactly the functionality I want. However, it does
> not seem to show the relationship correctly. For example:
>
> http://api.twitter.com/1/friendships/show.xml?target_screen_name=rid00z&source_screen_name=dmethvin
>
> The result says rid00z is not following me but my profile page says he is.
>
> --
> Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc
> API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi
> Issues/Enhancements Tracker:
> http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list
> Change your membership to this group:
> http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
>

-- 
Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc
API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi
Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list
Change your membership to this group: 
http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk

Re: [twitter-dev] Re: At Reply Spam

[TjL]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Dewald Pretorius  wrote:
> If not, then you may have de facto invalidated that section of your
> rules and by implication exempted all developers and applications from
> it.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Um… Yeah.

Here's the thing: it's Twitter's playground.

They can do whatever they want with it.

Just because they do it, doesn't mean you can do it.

I don't know what sort of universal, "nature law" you think applies
here, but it doesn't.

TjL

-- 
Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc
API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi
Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list
Change your membership to this group: 
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Re: [twitter-dev] "Does user X follow user Y?"

[TjL]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 1:06 PM, Dave Methvin  wrote:
> The Twitter API lets me get the followers of Y but it seems wasteful and
> slow to request what could be a list of hundreds of followers in the social
> graph and look for X on the client side. Is there a better and faster way?
>

http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/friendships/show

-- 
Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc
API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi
Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list
Change your membership to this group: 
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Re: [twitter-dev] At Reply Spam

[TjL]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 11:45 AM, Arnaud Meunier  wrote:
> Neither our TOS nor our Automation Rules & Best Practices
> (http://support.twitter.com/articles/76915) have changed since the launch
> of @twittersuggests experimental feature :)

I think that's pretty much what I said :)

-- 
Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc
API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi
Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list
Change your membership to this group: 
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Re: [twitter-dev] At Reply Spam

[TjL]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 8:31 AM, Dewald Pretorius  wrote:
> With reference to @twittersuggests, is other unsolicited @reply spam
> now also officially sanctioned by Twitter?

When has Twitter ever given you the idea that they were playing by the
same rules as everyone else?

-- 
Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc
API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi
Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list
Change your membership to this group: 
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Re: [twitter-dev] What's happening with Tweetie for Mac

[TjL]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Isaiah Carew  wrote:
>
> 1.  You're decimating the client market on every platform but Windows.

The  iPhone and Mac versions of Tweetie have been a) dominant and b)
free (ad-supported).

If your app was set to compete with Tweetie 2 on the Mac and iPhone
before this, it still is.

If it wasn't, it still isn't.

Also, you've had a LOT of time to compete against Tweetie on the Mac.
If you missed the window, well, sorry.

> 2.  You're killing any potential for innovation or investment.

Oh, baloney. Ask BareBones how BBEdit has done competing against the
free version of TextEdit.

In 2010, you are going to compete with "free". That sucks, but it's
the reality of the situation. You'd better have a plan in place for
it.

I'm still giving EchoFon for Mac and iPhone a serious look. Why?
Because it has features Tweetie doesn't.

I'd start with looking at what Tweetie doesn't offer. What does it
make too difficult?

"really wish i knew why so many twitter clients are against keyboard
navigation and proper highlighting"

http://twitter.com/bynkii/status/12026843737 (21 hours ago… Via Tweetie)

Tweetie breaks several Mac UI principles ("click to select a word"
comes to mind).

A good UI for filtering tweets based on strings ("SXSW" comes to
mind). Sync between Mac and iPhone.

Push notifications for mentions.

Push notifications for mentions only for people who follow you.

Push notifications for mentions only for people you follow.

Push notifications of new posts by only a select group of people (like
SMS notifications, but without SMS).

I'm still waiting for someone to build a big enough database to get
relationship data in-app ("x person is also followed by these people
you follow", as one example).

There are a half-dozen ideas off the top of my head.


> 3.  You have no clear (public) plan for any innovation yourself.
Have you published your plan for innovation somewhere? I'm under the
impression that *most* companies keep their future plans a fairly well
guarded secret. (Well, except for Microsoft, who tell you what they
are going to do and then do 1/100th of it 4 years later.)

TjL


-- 
To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.

Re: [twitter-dev] Re: Upcoming changes to the way status IDs are sequenced

[TjL]

Will you still be able to look at two relative IDs and tell which one
came first and which one came second?

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
twitter-development-talk+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email 
with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.

[twitter-dev] Re: Rate Limit: Two accounts on single machine or the limit for the IP of machine with those accounts? - thats the question!

[TjL]

If they are authenticated requests, they will count towards the
account whitelist limit, but not the IP limit.

If they are not authenticated, they count towards the IP limit…

TjL


On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Atul Kulkarni  wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have a small question,
>
> if I run two different scripts authorized with two different accounts
> (whitelisted) from the same machine (IP whitelisted), will the rate limit of
> the machine which i thnk will be reached be counted (given that I am using
> same machine for the both the requests) or the rate limit for the two
> different accounts with authorization be used? I don't want them to fight
> against eachother for rate, hence the question.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Atul Kulkarni
> www.d.umn.edu/~kulka053
>

[twitter-dev] Re: linespaces / whitespace being removed: bug or feature?

[TjL]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Chad Etzel  wrote:

> Just to follow up. We have determined that this is a bug and the
> engineering team is working to figure out how this snuck in. I'm
> afraid I don't have an ETA on a fix, but we are working on it.

FYI "how this snuck in" is fairly suspicious, given that there had
been some fairly prominent use of whitespace just a few hours before
this "bug" appeared:

http://favrd.textism.com/tweet/4998900426

http://favrd.textism.com/tweet/4999223282

I'm not alone in thinking the timing is suspicious, especially if this
wasn't some quickly undoable change. It works one way for years, then
"accidentally" gets changed but you can't figure out what happened or
how to undo it?

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: linespaces / whitespace being removed: bug or feature?

[TjL]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Chad Etzel  wrote:
>
> Just to follow up. We have determined that this is a bug and the
> engineering team is working to figure out how this snuck in. I'm
> afraid I don't have an ETA on a fix, but we are working on it.


Good to know it isn't a permanent change.

Thanks Chad

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: linespaces / whitespace being removed: bug or feature?

[TjL]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Michael Ivey  wrote:

> As an aside; please don't bump threads on this list.

As an aside, how about someone answers the question rather than just
getting pissy at people who are trying to figure out how a change is
going to effect products they're building around Twitter's API?

If Twitter is getting rid of whitespace, that means I can strip out a
bunch of code in certain places.

I'd like someone to comment on this officially.

TjL

[twitter-dev] linespaces / whitespace being removed: bug or feature?

[TjL]

http://twitter.com/status/show/5008681027.xml| was entered with
newlines between the words. It does not show the newlines.

http://twitter.com/status/show/4999223282.xml shows that this was
working just a few hours ago.

Both were entered on the web.

Is this a bug or an intended change?

[twitter-dev] Re: Deleting a Retweeted Tweet

[TjL]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Joseph Cheek  wrote:
>
> what?  Every time my app submits a tweet with the reply id set, that
> limits the people who can see it?

Were you not around for The Great @Reply Upheaval of 2009?

> ouch!  deleting tweet IDs in my messages ASAP...

As long as you understand that means a) people are going to see
@replies to people they do NOT follow, which is NOT what the vast
majority of Twitter users wanted; and b) this will break any app which
tries to "thread" conversations in Twitter, making it impossible for
people to see which message it was in reply to.

Dropping the in_reply_to would be like replying to an email sent to a
discussion list, changing the Subject, and not quoting any of the
message you are replying to.

[twitter-dev] Re: Deleting a Retweeted Tweet

[TjL]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Neicole  wrote:
>
> Boy, this concerns me. People definitely need to be able to add their
> own comments to the RT.

No they don't. If they want to comment on it, let them write a comment
and post an URL to the original message.

If you could add a comment to an RT and someone "favorites" that, who
does the favorite go to? This way the recipient is clear: it should go
to the person who originally said it.



> And removing the retweets if someone deletes the original tweet?!  No
> way. Once it's retweeted, that retweet "belongs" to the retweeter and
> must stay.

If you want to "own" something, come up with your own words.


> I think it violates social media principles to delete them.

Fortunately Twitter doesn't think you own the right to control someone
else's words just because you repeat them.

Personally I've never really understood 99% of the RTs, especially
when someone with 50 followers RTs something that someone with 600k
followers said, but that's also beside the point.

[twitter-dev] Re: What is 140 characters?

[TjL]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 1:07 AM, Matt Sanford  wrote:
>    I more than agree with the above statement that a character is a
> character and Twitter shouldn't care. Data should be data. The main
> issue with that is that some clients compose characters and some
> don't. My common example of this is é. Depending on your client
> Twitter could get:
>
> é - 1 byte
>   - URL Encoded UTF-8: %C3%A9
>   - http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00e9/index.htm
>
> -- or --
>
> é - 2 bytes
>   - URL Encoded UTF-8: %65%CC%81
>   - http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0065/index.htm
>     + plus: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0301/index.htm
>
>    So, my fix will make it so that no matter the client if the user
> sees é it counts as a single character. I'll announce something in the
> change log once my fix is deployed.

Sorry for being picky about this, I'm just trying to make sure that
I'm understanding the terms correctly as you are using them.

I tend to think of Twitter as 140 "characters" (rather than bytes). I
realize that "character" may not have a precise definition, but to me,
each of these is "one character":

e é < & >

Am I understanding you correctly that Twitter is moving to standardize
where you can send a message with 140 "characters" regardless of
whether that's 140 e or 140 é or 140 < or 140 & or 140 > ?

I think that's what is being said, I just want to make sure I'm
understanding properly.

Thanks!

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: What is 140 characters?

[TjL]

It's been nearly 6 months. Has this question been answered? If so I missed it.



On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Alex Payne wrote:
>
> Unfortunately, nothing definitive. We're still looking into this.
>
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 07:56, Craig Hockenberry
>  wrote:
>>
>> Any news from the Service Team? I'd really like to get the counters
>> right in an upcoming release...
>>
>> -ch
>>
>> On Mar 6, 12:18 pm, Alex Payne  wrote:
>>> I'm taking this email to our Service Team, the folks who work on the
>>> back-end of the service. The whole "message body changing as it moves
>>> from cache to backing store" thing is totally unacceptable. Answers
>>> soon.
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 09:43, Craig Hockenberry
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> > Some discussion about this thread popped up on Twitter yesterday:
>>>
>>> > >> > thread/44be91d5ec5850fa>
>>>
>>> > Alex states that it's 140 bytes per tweet. So, of course, Loren
>>> > Brichter and I tried to prove that. With the following results:
>>>
>>> > 1) 140 characters that including ones that include HTML entities:
>>> > 
>>>
>>> > At the time of posting, this tweet showed up on the site and in feeds
>>> > with all 140 characters. After a few hours, the "<" was converted to
>>> > "<", increasing the count per character from one to four bytes and
>>> > decreasing the tweet length from 140 characters to 69. (You can see
>>> > this truncation at the end of the tweet: the "&" is from "<")
>>>
>>> > Presumably, this happens as tweets in the memcache are written though
>>> > to the backing store.
>>>
>>> > I also see a lot of Twitter clients that don't realize how special the
>>> > < and > entities are. It took me a LONG time to figure out what
>>> > was going on here.
>>>
>>> > 2) 140 Unicode _multi-byte_ characters: >> > status/1286199010>
>>>
>>> > What's curious is that Loren's example with 140 characters uses the
>>> > Unicode 27A1 glyph. It uses 3 bytes in UTF-8. Why didn't it get
>>> > truncated? This seems to contradict Alex's statement in the thread
>>> > mentioned above.
>>>
>>> > As people start to use things like Emoji, tinyarro.ws and generally
>>> > figure out that Unicode (UTF-8) is a valid type of data on Twitter,
>>> > our clients should adapt and display more accurate "characters
>>> > remaining" counts. I can count bytes instead of characters, but I'm
>>> > not sure if I should or not.
>>>
>>> > No one likes a truncated tweet: we need an explicit statement on how
>>> > to count and submit multi-byte characters and entities.
>>>
>>> > -ch
>>>
>>> --
>>> Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc.http://twitter.com/al3x
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
> http://twitter.com/al3x
>

[twitter-dev] Re: Getting screen_name from id without gazillion API calls?

[TjL]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 2:54 AM, Michael Steuer wrote:
> Do you have any code examples for this?

http://twitreport.tntluoma.com/id-to-name.html.sh

It's a work in progress

> So you basically maintain a local db of id-to- screen_names?

yes. each file in a given directory is named with the ID. Each file
has two lines: the first line is the users' "full name" and the second
is their "screenname"

If I need to lookup an ID, I just have to look to see if a file exists
with a matching filename. If it doesn't, I call Twitter.

Due to the nature of the way Twitter works, most of the people who
started using it are people who follow me (which is how they found out
about it) so there's a lot of overlap of "friendship circles" or
whatever you want to call them. I haven't done much advertising of the
service, which means that it hasn't grown beyond its means.


> Do you get all of a user's friend/follower id's and then look up their screen 
> names with
> individual API calls?

Yes, if not cached.


> What do you do when a user has more relationships than the API
> limit will allow you to query?

I have placed an artificial limit on the number of relationships the
script will check. I think it's 2,000. So if @sween decides to follow
@oprah and @oprah uses TwitReports, she's not going to get as good of
as report as others.

However, for the majority of the cases, I usually see people with
fewer than 2,000 followers following people with fewer than 2,000
followers.


> And what about users that change their
> screen name? In short, can you provide a bit more background to your
> methods?

Changing screen names is the biggest drawback, of course. The new
version of the script has built-in expiration which can be set to any
number of days. I've set mine to 7.

I wish that follower/friends information came with names as well as
IDs, but everything I've heard from Twitter about this on this list
tells me not to hold my breath…

TjL

ps — perhaps a better plan than just expiring the data would be
validating it, which is to say: every 7/14/30 days, check to see if
the information is still accurate. This could be done at off-peak
hours (say 3-6am eastern time USA) when my need for API hits is lower.

[twitter-dev] Re: Getting screen_name from id without gazillion API calls?

[TjL]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 11:09 AM, owkaye wrote:
> The ideal solution is for Twitter to "change the system" and allow each
> account to have only one screen name, all the time, forever, with no
> changes. Then a separate "id" value is not required because all account
> identification will be done by the original screen name.

This is overkill.

First of all, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of abandoned
usernames. I was able to take one over, which didn't interfere with
anything: all my stats remained the same, I didn't lose any of my
followers or friends.

I know at least two people who have changed usernames to protect their
privacy (switching from their "real names" to something more
anonymous).


> Email doesn't just let you change your address whenever you feel like it,
> and I see no reason why Twitter should allow screen name changes either ...

Twitter isn't email.


Signed:
@tj

formerly @luomat

forever 7344012 :-)

[twitter-dev] Re: Getting screen_name from id without gazillion API calls?

[TjL]

caching is the best answer i have found

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 9:01 PM, dizid wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> When i request friends (or followers) from the Twitter API i want to
> get the screen_name's based on the id's.
>
> I use users/show for this, inputting the id and getting back de
> screen_name.
> This costs ALOT of API calls and i run into the API rate limit fast,
> especially with many friends.
>
> Is there a better way of getting screen_names for friends / followers?
> ( Better, meaning in fewer API calls.)
>
> Thank you.
>

[twitter-dev] Re: Private user's 'following' information: why am I denied access via API but can get through Twitter.com?

[TjL]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 3:37 AM, Tweet Thief wrote:
> curl -D - -s -u user:pass
> "http://twitter.com/friendships/exists.xml?user_a=just_me_hi&user_b=tweetthief";

Try the (new?) friendship/show:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-friendships-show

curl -D - -s --netrc
"http://twitter.com/friendships/show.xml?target_screen_name=tweetthief&source_screen_name=just_me_hi";

(you can avoid putting your username and password on the commandline
if you use ~/.netrc)

I was just looking at it for a little script I use that mimics doesfollow.com

The advantage seems to be that you get both "directions" (does a
follow b and does b follow a) in one API call, which makes a lot of
sense.

Dunno how long it's been there, but it's new to me… and it's one of my
favorite new features in a long time, minor though it is.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: [ANN] statuses/home_timeline resource now available (though it doesn't include retweets yet)

[TjL]

from the API page

> Twitter REST API Method: statuses/home_timeline [COMING SOON]
> Returns the 20 most recent statuses, including retweets, posted by the 
> authenticating user and that user's friends. This is the equivalent of 
> /timeline/home on the Web.
>
> Usage note: This home_timeline is identical to statuses/friends_timeline 
> except it also contains retweets, which statuses/friends_timeline does not 
> (for backwards compatibility reasons). In a future version of the API, 
> statuses/friends_timeline will go away and be replaced by home_timeline.
>

Does this mean that "in a future version of the API" there won't be
any way to get a friends timeline without retweets?

Because the ability to ignore retweets ought to be a Day 1 feature, IMO.

I would put a much higher value on a unified feed which includes
"*mentions* and friends" than "*retweets* and friends"

FWIW

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: DM Length

[TjL]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Dewald Pretorius wrote:
>
> There is something very quirky going on with DMs. That 841-character
> DM that I received is now only returning 247 characters when I
> retrieve it via the API.

~245 character (bytes?) DMs have been working for some time now,
through API methods.

I assume this is a temporary situation, but it is kind of handy :-)

TjL

[twitter-dev] Change Device Updates only through API?

[TjL]

I just went to turn on SMS notifications for a couple of users, and
realized that the website will tell me whether or not notifications
("Device Updates") are ON or OFF but won't let me change them.

Is this a temporary change or glitch? I didn't see anything about it
on the list.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Early developer preview: Retweeting API

[TjL]

(Cards on the table: I say the following as someone who thinks that
retweets are one of the biggest useless annoyances on Twitter.)

1) This change/addition would be great IFF retweets were then NOT part
of replies/mentions. I've got a script that checks for mentions and
then emails me them, and RTs are just clutter.


2) I would MUCH RATHER see something done about being able to follow a
conversation, i.e. I give you a status ID, and you show me all the
messages related to it (all the messages in the 'conversation chain'
before or after it.

This has been a long-standing wish causing many people to try to
create their own hackish workarounds because really it has to be
supported in the API.


3) It would be nice if someone RTs a message and someone 'favorites'
it, the favorite goes to the original author. OTOH then we get into
"Well is this a 'value added' RT?" and then "Does 'HAHAHA THIS MADE ME
LAFF' count as 'value'?" but at least for "straight" RTs, it would at
least bring some value to having this in the API.


I realize that not everyone will benefit from every API change, but
focusing on something like RTs (which definitely have lots of fans and
lots of detractors) instead of conversation threads (which people have
been requesting for longer than RTs have even been 'a thing' and which
I've never heard anyone be against and can't imagine what an argument
against would even look like) is confusing to me.

My 2¢

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: How do I handle 302 redirects with curl?

[TjL]

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 2:37 AM, Chad Etzel wrote:
> You may have to follow redirects more than once *wink wink nudge nudge*
>
> with curl you can add --location flag. There's a good bit of info in
> the man page as well.

So instead of doing

curl --netrc -s -D - http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml

I should be doing

curl --location --referer ";auto" --netrc -s -D -
http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml

(where "http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml"; is just one example)

TjL

ps - I'm not doing this through PHP, it's all on the commandline

[twitter-dev] How do I handle 302 redirects with curl?

[TjL]

All of my scripts check for "Status 200" before proceeding.

Now we are (sometimes) getting a 302, but when I try

curl --netrc -s -D - http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml

Gave me a 302 with a Location of:

http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml?c73f7db0

but when I tried

curl --netrc -s -D - 'http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml?c73f7db0'

it seemed to want to redirect me to

http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml

If "accepting 30x" is a requirement now, I'd like some advice on how to do so.

TjL

[twitter-dev] friends timeline change: Temporary or permanent?

[TjL]

I just tried this

curl -D - -s --netrc
'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?since_id=3166251802&count=200'

and got back this:

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Content-Length: 0
Location: /statuses/friends_timeline.xml?since_id=3166251802&count=200?0115dfe8

Since my program is designed to look for HTTP Status 200, it's failing.

I can re-code it to deal with the 302, but if this IS just a temporary
change (hence the 302) I might just wait it out.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: name in full is too long

[TjL]

If a Twitter username has been idle for (6? 9?) months, you can
request that Twitter let you take it over. However please note that
these are considered "low priority" requests and can take a LONG time
for anyone to respond.

And this list isn't the place to do it.

http://help.twitter.com/portal is probably the right place to start.

I'd recommend finding another name for the time being.

TjL

ps - with all the "one post wonders" out there, I hope that Twitter
will eventually go through and purge accounts that haven't been used
in a year.

[twitter-dev] Re: OAUTH: Basic Auth is simpler/more reliable/more secure/better received than OAuth!?

[TjL]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 7:27 AM, chinaski007 wrote:

> [the same post three different times]

WE GET IT. YOU DON'T LIKE OAUTH.

Your (probably statistically insignificant) tests with Google
Optimizer reveal that your users are more likely to sign-up for Basic
Auth than OAuth.

WE GET IT.

Did you need to start three different threads to say exactly the same
thing on the same day?

[twitter-dev] Problems with http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.atom

[TjL]

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-friends_timeline
lists

URL:
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.format

Formats:
xml, json, rss, atom

But most times when I try to access the Atom feed, I get this

You are being http://twitter.com/login";>redirected.

(in case it matters, I tried this via

for EXT in xml json rss atom
do
curl -s --netrc "http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.$EXT"; >
twitterfeed.$EXT
done

about 10 times, and all but 2 of them gave me the above error.)

Anyone else seeing this?

I'm trying to figure out if there's a reason to use one format over
another. Right now Atom seems like an unreliable choice.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: follow limits

[TjL]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Mario Menti wrote:
>
> This is a real pain, and while struggling with this (I still have at least
> 3-4 days to go though), I thought of this suggestion: why not make the
> follow limits apply only to users who aren't following me already?
>
> That way, if I'm a spammer trying to follow thousands of people I'll still
> be hit by the limits, but if I'm a legit accoubt that just wants to follow
> back a few thousand users who are already following me, the follow requests
> *against existing followers* wouldn't count. Any reason why this wouldn't be
> a better solution?

Makes sense to me. "Following back a follower" doesn't seem like it
ought to count against a "follow-per-day" limit.

Of course I'm not the one who has to write the code :-)

TjL

[twitter-dev] New Shell Script to Get Mentions via Email

[TjL]

I have been curious for some time if it would be possible to get
Twitter "mentions" via email.

Twitter does not (yet?) offer this possibility, so I decided to roll my own.

You can find the program (and example of how the resultant emails look) here:

http://luo.ma/64

But the basic summary of important points:

* Text of the Mention is put in the Subject line

* Body of the message shows:

** Follower name (both screenname and "real" name" next to Twitter icon

** Following/Friend Count

** Total post count

** The message they are replying to, if applicable (Am I the only one
who gets @replies and has NO IDEA what message someone is replying to,
only to find out they are apparently "catching up" with Twitter and
responding to a really old message?)

** Bio/URL/Location (if available)

* Emails are sent in HTML (very minimal and clean, handwritten) but
also sends a plain/text alternative with the same information
available to those who prefer that (obviously you won't see Twitter
icons in that case).

* Only uses one API hit each time it is run (see next bullet point)

* Requires at least a little knowledge of *nix and access to an
account with 'cron' but my guess is that anyone who is developing apps
for Twitter can probably manage this quite easily. The script itself
is written in bash, with my usual copious notes.

(Possible future additions: links to the "mention" and in-reply-to
message. However my current use is such that the email will notify me
of the message, and if I want to do anything with it, I will fire up
my Twitter client.)

I hope this is useful to others. In the 24 hours of its existence, it
seems to work pretty well, although I'm sure there may be some edge
cases I haven't met up with yet. The email formatting has been tested
on Gmail and the iPhone, as those are the two ways I access email. It
*should* work fine with OS X's Mail app, Outlook, or any client.

TjL


ps - I might also suggest it as a possible revision for how Twitter
might format their own "Direct Message" emails. You'll note that much
of the message itself is clearly visible when previewed in Gmail [or
other clients with message preview] as opposed to the Twitter Direct
Messages, which start out with superfluous information telling me I
have a new Direct Message, which I can already tell by the Subject
line. But this is a tangential point :-)

[twitter-dev] Sending DMs via curl with extended characters?

[TjL]

OK, so I'm doing something wrong here:

curl -D - -s -u tj:SECKRET \
-d "text=BstTwt: ❥ @tj Her:"The lightbulbs are over the
dryer" Me:"The rooster flies east at dawn"
Her:"What?" Me: "Oh, I thought we were talking like
spies" &user=tj"  http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml

That will go through with no error, HOWEVER, what actually gets sent
is truncated at the first &

(The same thing happens if there's a & or ")

S... what am I doing wrong?

Or, "How can I get the entire message to go through?"

I can't change it back, because if I switch " into a " that will
confuse this too.

Thanks

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Our own redirecting URL is being changed to a bit.ly URL

[TjL]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Cameron Kaiser  wrote:
>
>> The best you can do is use the bit.ly API to un-shorten the link and
>> grab your URL key from there.
>>
>> Have a look at the /expand method in their API:
>> http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation
>
> Or, implement your own URL shortening scheme (either internally, or using
> a specific service that meets your needs), with the assumption that the
> shortening will occur and at least this way you can control the situation
> under how the shortening is handled.

I believe that Twitter will shorten links over 30 characters, but this
does not *always* seem to be the case.

Your best bet (IMO) is to determine which service you want to use and
shorten the links yourself. I started putting together a list of them
not too long ago and came up with these:

bit.ly
xrl.us
tr.im
snipr.com
tinyarro.ws
tinyurl.com
icanhaz.com
budurl.com

There are, no doubt, others.

[twitter-dev] Re: Public ID to Name Lookup website?

[TjL]

My apologies for being unclear.

What I would like is something very much like

http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?user_id=1401881

except in HTML, or some presentation style a little more "user
friendly" to the non-developer who probably doesn't know anything
about the API and wouldn't want raw XML in their browser.


(Perhaps it will help to know that what I am looking to do is be able
to provide a link in TwitReports which a user can click on and find
current info about a follower, even if s/he has changed their Twitter
name since the TwitReport was sent.)

TjL

[twitter-dev] Public ID to Name Lookup website?

[TjL]

I know how to change a Twitter ID to a name, but I was wondering if
there was already a website out there that does it, for example if you
put in

http://domain.tld/twitterid/7344012

it would show information for @tj

Just checking that this doesn't already exist before I think about
building it :-)

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Send @replies/mentions via SMS?

[TjL]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Derek Gathright  wrote:
> If you (or anyone else) is still looking for something, I have a bot that I
> wrote a while back at twitter.com/dmreply.  Just request to follow, I'll
> approve, and then it will automatically forward any @replies to you via a
> DM.  Your account has to be public as it uses Twitter Search to retrieve the
> tweets.  Simple, requires no authentication info, unfollow at anytime to
> turn off the service.

That's how I started, but then I realized that people I have blocked
would be sent, and I have a (very) few followers whose updates are
protected, and I wouldn't see there.

Of course as soon as I finished this, I realized that what would be
*better* for my use would actually be email notification of
'mentions', so that's what I'm working on now. The nice thing is that
you're not bound to 140 characters in email, so I can also include
what the message was in_reply_to (I have a few followers who @reply
HOURS later and I often have no idea what they are referring to), and
hopefully even a link to @reply back to them, including a proper
in_reply_to also.



> I remembered trying to do it back in the Track days, but tracking @derek
> failed miserably as it dropped the @ and I instantly got swamped with tweets
> mentioning "derek".

Yeah, I'm thinking about using the search API for a "roll my own"
"track" functionality too.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Notifications info vague/wrong

[TjL]

1) http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-users%C2%A0show
suggests that you can use any of: xml json rss atom but rss and atom
are not working at all:

Try this on the commandline:

for EXT in xml json rss atom
do;
echo "
$EXT:"
curl  "http://twitter.com/users/show.$EXT?screen_name=moltz";
done

and you'll see that RSS and ATOM return nothing at all.



2) If I go to http://twitter.com/moltz I see that notifications are
ON, but if I check via commandline it says:


$ curl --netrc  "http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=moltz";

returns

  0

and

$ curl --netrc  "http://twitter.com/users/show.json?screen_name=moltz";

returns

"notifications":0


if I turn OFF notifications, XML returns

  false

and json returns

"notifications":false

soo

does
"notifications" = "0" mean "you have notifications turned on"
and
"notifications" = "false" means you do not?

Sounds like a job for either "0 and 1" or "true and false".

Am I missing something?

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Send @replies/mentions via SMS?

[TjL]

Well, I started over and about two hours later I had a script written.

I've been testing / tweaking it today and it does seem to work.

Basic premise is fairly simple, it checks
"http://twitter.com/statuses/mentions.rss?since_id=$LAST_ID";

where $LAST_ID is stored in a text file as the last ID that was found/forwarded.

I then send the message as a DM to myself, which has the added benefit
of being able to use the http://twitter.com/devices setting for "quiet
hours" already. (I have DMs sent to forward to my cell already)

I also built in some rudimentary filtering to avoid some *people*
(such as reTweet bots) and some regex (such as "RT @tj" and "(via @tj)
since I don't need/want those sent via SMS.

One benefit of using the 'mentions' API vs the search API (which was
what I had originally tried) is that it automatically excludes people
that you have blocked, which search does not.

My plan is to check it out for a few days, and if it seems to work
I'll write up a description of how it works and post the code as well.

If anyone would like to see it in its current state, drop me a note
(preferably offlist, so everyone doesn't have to see it) at
luo...@gmail.com

TjL

[twitter-dev] Send @replies/mentions via SMS?

[TjL]

I've been banging my head against this for several days (when I've had
"free time") and wonder if maybe someone has already invented this
wheel.

I'm looking for a way to get @replies (sorry, I mean "mentions") via SMS.

*ahem*
   Ideally this would be an officially supported option
listed in http://twitter.com/devices :-)
*ahem*

But, since it isn't :-)

My idea has been to fetch the
http://twitter.com/statuses/mentions.format every minute or so, check
against a cache of previously sent "mentions" and send the new ones
(as DMs to myself, since I have DMs forwarded to my cell via SMS
already).

This seems HUGELY inefficient (i.e. there will be a LOT of minutes
throughout the day which return no new "mentions") but I can't think
of a more efficient way of getting them in a fairly timely manner.

Thanks for any pointers.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Can Twitter please pick a From: and stick with it?

[TjL]

*sigh*

Seriously? I've already started telling people to change their filters
and now they're going to break *again*.

This is why daddy drinks.

All kidding aside, I don't understand how a change like this gets
pushed out without the left hand knowing WTF the right hand is doing —
which is what it looks like (from an outsider's perspective) happened.

IMO/FWIW: You've gotten too big to make these sorts of changes without
more consideration and communication. It makes me look bad as a
developer, and it makes Twitter look bad.

The irony is that you're a company built around communication.

TjL





On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Matt Sanford  wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
>    The change in from address was meant to fix the 'allow images' but in the
> process broke some ISP spam filters, some spam reporting, and a great many
> people's mail filters. We're working on rolling that back now. Sorry for the
> disruption.
>
> Thanks;
>  – Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
>     Twitter Dev
>
> On May 6, 2009, at 3:13 PM, TjL wrote:
>
>>
>> FWIW I think "nore...@twitter.com" is the right choice, it's certainly
>> a lot easier for image display, etc.
>>
>> But it sounds like John Adams thinks this is going to change back. I
>> hope this will be clarified.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Matt Sanford  wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi there,
>>>
>>>   We had changed the from address to try and improve bounce reporting and
>>> prevent being marked as spam by major ISPs. When we added the HTML
>>> formatting we found that we needed a consistent address for the 'always
>>> display images' option in many clients so we changed things around again.
>>> Hopefully this will be the last change as it causes us a bunch of work as
>>> well. I'll keep an eye out for future changes and try and let people
>>> know.
>>>
>>> Thanks;
>>>  – Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
>>>    Twitter Dev
>>>
>>> On May 6, 2009, at 2:53 PM, TjL wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> The email notifications for new followers used to come from (From:)
>>>>
>>>> Twitter 
>>>>
>>>> then it changed to
>>>>
>>>> Twitter 
>>>>
>>>> then it changed to
>>>>
>>>> Twitter 
>>>>
>>>> again.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Every time you do this, every single person using TwitReport has to
>>>> change their filters, and I spend 2 weeks, at least, explaining to
>>>> people why it stopped working, and some number of people probably
>>>> assume that things are broken on my end and stop using it altogether.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not making a dime off of this project (nor do I want to), it's
>>>> something that I'm doing to make Twitter a bit nicer to use, but
>>>> having something as basic as this change twice and break the entire
>>>> thing is a bit of a pain in the ass and a not-insignificant waste of
>>>> time.
>>>>
>>>> So I hope that y'all will keep this one, since you've liked it enough
>>>> to use it twice now :-)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> THAT SAID, I'm glad that the *format* of the notifications has
>>>> improved. I certainly think that is the right way to go.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> - TjL
>>>
>>>
>
>

[twitter-dev] Re: Can Twitter please pick a From: and stick with it?

[TjL]

FWIW I think "nore...@twitter.com" is the right choice, it's certainly
a lot easier for image display, etc.

But it sounds like John Adams thinks this is going to change back. I
hope this will be clarified.


On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Matt Sanford  wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
>    We had changed the from address to try and improve bounce reporting and
> prevent being marked as spam by major ISPs. When we added the HTML
> formatting we found that we needed a consistent address for the 'always
> display images' option in many clients so we changed things around again.
> Hopefully this will be the last change as it causes us a bunch of work as
> well. I'll keep an eye out for future changes and try and let people know.
>
> Thanks;
>  – Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
>     Twitter Dev
>
> On May 6, 2009, at 2:53 PM, TjL wrote:
>
>>
>> The email notifications for new followers used to come from (From:)
>>
>> Twitter 
>>
>> then it changed to
>>
>> Twitter 
>>
>> then it changed to
>>
>> Twitter 
>>
>> again.
>>
>>
>> Every time you do this, every single person using TwitReport has to
>> change their filters, and I spend 2 weeks, at least, explaining to
>> people why it stopped working, and some number of people probably
>> assume that things are broken on my end and stop using it altogether.
>>
>> I'm not making a dime off of this project (nor do I want to), it's
>> something that I'm doing to make Twitter a bit nicer to use, but
>> having something as basic as this change twice and break the entire
>> thing is a bit of a pain in the ass and a not-insignificant waste of
>> time.
>>
>> So I hope that y'all will keep this one, since you've liked it enough
>> to use it twice now :-)
>>
>>
>> THAT SAID, I'm glad that the *format* of the notifications has
>> improved. I certainly think that is the right way to go.
>>
>>
>> - TjL
>
>

[twitter-dev] Can Twitter please pick a From: and stick with it?

[TjL]

The email notifications for new followers used to come from (From:)

Twitter 

then it changed to

Twitter 

then it changed to

Twitter 

again.


Every time you do this, every single person using TwitReport has to
change their filters, and I spend 2 weeks, at least, explaining to
people why it stopped working, and some number of people probably
assume that things are broken on my end and stop using it altogether.

I'm not making a dime off of this project (nor do I want to), it's
something that I'm doing to make Twitter a bit nicer to use, but
having something as basic as this change twice and break the entire
thing is a bit of a pain in the ass and a not-insignificant waste of
time.

So I hope that y'all will keep this one, since you've liked it enough
to use it twice now :-)


THAT SAID, I'm glad that the *format* of the notifications has
improved. I certainly think that is the right way to go.


- TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Signup URL?

[TjL]

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Pleasant Software
 wrote:
>
> Which URL should I use to link to Twitter's signup page on a iPhone?
>
> I tried http://twitter.com/signup but this results in a error "Extra
> content at the end of the document" in Safari.
>
> When using http://twitter.com or http://m.twitter.com, the user lands
> on a "sign in" page for mobile devices. On this "sign in" isn't any
> "Sign up" or "Join" link. So this doesn't seem a got URL to land on
> for signing up either.
>
> Any advice?

In the interim, I'd use http://twitter.com/login

It's a "light" page which won't take long to load, and there are
instructions there for "completing" an account creation if they are
already using it on their cell phone, or create a new account if
needed.

[twitter-dev] DM via curl?

[TjL]

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-direct_messages%C2%A0new?SearchFor=direct+message&sp=4

gives this example:

# curl -u user:password -d "text=all your bases are belong to
use&user=user_2" http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml

I tried this

# curl -u "luomat:PASSWORD" -d "text=test&user=tj"
http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml

and got this



  /direct_messages/new.xml
  Invalid request.


Am I missing something?

[twitter-dev] Didn't someone do a "Show all followers and last tweet"?

[TjL]

I've been trying without success to find a Twitter 3rd party app that
I thought I saw awhile ago:

Put in your username and it shows all your followers on one page with
their icon and their latest update.

Anyone know what it's called?

I need to start bookmarking these Twitter services.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: sending DM to all followers?

[TjL]

@TwitReport has, until today, auto-followed anyone who followed it,
for functionality of the app (basically, being able to get a DM with
some basic information about your new follower).

In the last few days apparently it ended up on some "list" of
auto-followers, and I saw about 50 new followers, about half of whom
sent some spammy bull-patty nonsense to me via DM in the guise of a
"Hey, thanks for the follow WANT TO MAKE MONEY" etc.

I don't think most of them were even using the service, they just
wanted to be able to get their message out by any means necessary.

So now @TwitReport doesn't auto-follow, and the usefulness is
decreased, all because some people have to piss all over everything by
turning it into some marketing tool.

For what it's worth.

TjL

[twitter-dev] acceptable Profile Image Formats

[TjL]

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#account/updateprofileimage
says

> image.  Required.  Must be a valid GIF, JPG, or PNG image

So it's safe to assume that anything I pull out of 
is going to be either .gif or .jpg or .png?

TjL

[twitter-dev] OT - Twitter Status Page and colors

[TjL]

I'm not sure where to mention this, but as someone with some red/green
color-blindness, the "Status per Feature" section of
http://status.twitter.com is mostly useless to me.

I would recommend changing to some method that doesn't rely on color
as the only method of conveying that information:

web features - OK
SMS - partial
user delete - OK
user restore - OK
person search - OK
pagination - partial
badges - OK
Facebook app - OK
API - OK
IM - dead

or colors that contrast better than light red/light green.

IIRC, some level of color blindness is common in about 10% of the male
population.

[twitter-dev] Re: Planned site maintenance Apr 5, 2009 at 10AM PST

[TjL]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Doug Williams  wrote:
>
> Twitter.com and the API will be down for an hour beginning around 10AM PST on
> Sunday, April 5, 2009. We will use this maintenance window to relocate
> several services and upgrade system software.
>
> Tomorrow we will make a general site announcement for end users, but
> we would like to give developers more warning to prepare.

I look forward to seeing how well my scripts tolerate the downtime :-)

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: How can I automatically retweet from a list of followed accounts?

[TjL]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Jim  wrote:
> This presupposes that the followed accounts would be dedicated, i.e.
> set up solely for the purpose of twittering to the main account about
> the topic.
>
> Is this sort of thing allowed on Twitter?  Are there tools to help, or
> is there a straightforward solution without tools?

I'm not understanding what you are trying to accomplish.  Can you
describe some scenario where this would be triggered?  What problem
are you trying to solve?

Are you talking about RT'ing these *to* some account as an @reply or
RT'ing one Twitter user from a series of "bots"?

Because the former seems like you'd be better off saving an RSS feed
of a specific search term, and the latter seems like (at the least) a
bad idea, and (at the most) a possible TOS violation (I'm speculating,
I haven't looked at the TOS that closely).

It's hard to know what to suggest (even "don't do that") without a
more clear understanding of what you are trying to do.

THAT SAID: I don't know of any way to do this with the API anyway,
even for the various ideas of what I think you might mean.

TjL

[twitter-dev] scripts to show "Overlapping Circles" of friends/followers

[TjL]

I've made part of TwitReport into 3 different programs (well,
"scripts" really) so that they can be more easily used.

"Give two Twitter users, show me how many [and who] follows both of them"
http://twitreport.tntluoma.com/twitter-we-are-both-followed-by.sh

"Given two Twitter users, show me how many [and who] we both follow"
http://twitreport.tntluoma.com/twitter-we-both-follow.sh

"Given two Twitter users, show me how many [and who] "A" follows who
"B" also follows
http://twitreport.tntluoma.com/twitter-who-does-a-follow-who-follows-b.sh

   I would probably run the last one twice, once like this:

  twitter-who-does-a-follow-who-follows-b.sh joe ed

   and once like this

  twitter-who-does-a-follow-who-follows-b.sh ed joe


USAGE:
==
1) Each of the scripts takes exactly two arguments, Twitternames (not
including the @)

2) Each will show the names of the people in the results (both 'name'
and 'screen_name' according the API)

3) If you use the '-c' flag as the *first* argument, each will only
report back a 'count' without the names (saves on API hits), for
example:

   twitter-who-does-a-follow-who-follows-b.sh -c joe ed

NOTES:
==

1) All 3 of those scripts rely on

http://twitreport.tntluoma.com/id-to-name.sh

to transform the Twitter ID #s into actual names.

2) The scripts use curl and the --netrc flag, which means your Twitter
credentials need to be in ~/.netrc like so:

machine twitter.com
login yourTwitterName
password seKret

3) id-to-name.sh will now cache results locally, to reduce API hits,
but if you run this on two people with 10s of thousands of overlapping
followers, well, as you know, each (uncached) ID-to-Name conversion is
an API hit.  I've thought about adding a user-configurable
"threshhold" to the scripts to limit the results that it will display,
but haven't done so in these versions.

Just coming up with the lists themselves is pretty easy, about 2 API
hits per script.  It's the conversion from IDs to Names that has the
"cost".

Anyway, they are offered here in case anyone can make use of them.
Not sure if they would be of interest to anyone else, but since I had
already written them up, I figured might as well share them here.

TjL

[twitter-dev] 'name' restrictions

[TjL]

On http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation :

account/update_profile says that a "name" is "Optional. Maximum of 20
characters."

1) On the website, it is NOT optional. You have to put something in
there.  Is this in the API as well (i.e. is the document out of date
here?)


2) Other than 20 characters, are there restrictions on what characters
can/cannot be used? (I'm not talking about specific words such as
"Twitter" but I mean things like !@&*(#

It appears there are not, since some people have even been able to put
unicode-letters going backwards in there (which come out as HTML
entities) but I thought I'd ask

TjL

[twitter-dev] id-to-name shell script updated

[TjL]

http://twitreport.tntluoma.com/id-to-name.sh has been updated.

It's a small shell script that takes one or more variables and does an
"ID to name" lookup.

if you use -s or --short as the first argument it will only show you
the @name (not the full name)

Big change here is that it now uses a local cache (in whatever $TEMP
folder you define, or /tmp/ if you do not).

Expiration of cached results is not handled in the script itself, I
would recommend a cron job to delete files based on whatever
parameters you want. Better to have a small tool that just does what
it is designed for :-)

As usual, I've commented the script heavily to try to explain what
each part does. Anyone who can suggest improvements, please do!

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: The OAuth Conundrum

[TjL]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 4:04 PM, Matt Sanford  wrote:
>     The low barrier to entry with the Twitter API it a great feature we
> don't want to lose. We think about it often, and I think about it all of the
> time in relation to OAuth. I see this as a concern as much as cron jobs and
> TwitPic integration. Possibly more so since all of those things are bourn of
> that ease of use. We don't want to lose that ease of use and we're working
> to find a way to keep that and increase user security.

This low bar is what has allowed me ANY access to the Twitter API,
because low-bar shell scripts are what I can do. So I just wanted to
say "thanks" for not shutting us off hastily, and if you need folks to
talk to about "how high is too high to keep the low bar from getting
too high" then, well, I'm your guy :-)

- @T"I took a couple of courses in Pascal and decided I didn't want to
be a CS major, so I just diddle around with shell scripts"J

[twitter-dev] Re: one-click follow

[TjL]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Matt Sanford  wrote:
> There are upcoming plans to build out that page some more, so don't everyone
> reply at once about what's not on there ;). Since this isn't the highest
> priority change being discussed I wanted to get a minimal version out so
> people could use it while we talk it over.

Thanks! I've already added a "Follow" link to TwitReport's email report.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.format and http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.format

[TjL]

Maybe I should explain what I am trying to do and see if there is a
better way to do it.

In Version 1.0 of TwitReport, I would "scrape" the content of a given
user's Twitter page, dump the HTML, and then grep/awk/sed the hell out
of it to get JUST the part that I wanted, which was the fullnames and
twitternames of the 36 followers shown for that given user.

I'm trying to avoid content scraping, because it's a bad idea and
horribly hackish, and trying to get roughly that same information,
which is to say "Here is a list of other people who this person
follows besides you".

Scraping only gives me 36, starting with the "who joined Twitter first"

API gives me 100, but it's "the last 100 people this person started to
follow, with the newest on top"

Ideally I'd like 100 starting with the first person they ever followed
OR 100 starting with the one who has been on Twitter longest.

Thanks for any pointers.

TjL

[twitter-dev] http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.format and http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.format

[TjL]

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#UserMethods says

> followers
> Returns the authenticating user's followers, each with current status inline. 
>  They are ordered by the order in which they joined Twitter (this is going to 
> be changed).
>URL: http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.format

1) What is this going to be changed *to*?

2) ETA for this change? "soon" "someday" etc [I realize it's subject
to change, I'm not looking for a set-in-stone answer]


also

> friends
> Returns the authenticating user's friends, each with current status inline. 
> They are ordered by the order in which they were added as friends.
> It's also possible to request another user's recent friends list via the id 
> parameter below.
> URL: http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.format

"ordered by the order in which they were added as friends" = "newest
'friend' on top"

Is there a way to retrieve the information that we see in the
"Following Block" on a user's twitterpage (the icons of 36 people they
follow, starting with those who joined Twitter first) other than
content-scraping, which I know is something that should be avoided?


Thanks

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Why is cruft getting injected into links sent by DM?!

[TjL]

Hrm. When I check my DMs via Twitterrific, the URLs are not fubar'd.

Perhaps http://twitter.com/direct_messages is just suffering as part
of the overall Twitter malaise going on today.

Chat: BTW, thanks for the reminder about the DM API. I hadn't used it
before because I was confused about how to use it, but it appears this
is the correct format:

curl -s --netrc -d  text="This is a test DM using the DM api"
'http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml?user=twitreport'

When I sent this:

curl -s --netrc -d  \
text="@flP5eg spam alert: uses Google as URL
http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/spam?te...@flp5eg"; \
'http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml?user=twitreport'

it still shows up FUBAR'd in http://twitter.com/direct_messages but
SMS and Twitterrific show it as expected.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Why is cruft getting injected into links sent by DM?!

[TjL]

I built a check into TwitReport that tells me whenever a user has
"google.com" as their URL.

Why? Because all of the "free iPhone" spammers lately are using
"google.com" as their URL, and this makes it easier to catch/report.

(trying to do my best to be a good Twitter citizen)

TwitReport sends me a DM telling me:

a) the @name of the person using Google as their URL (which I can
click on to view their page)

b) gives me a prompt to report them to @spam via DM

Here's the code:

curl --silent --netrc -d \
 status="d twitreport @${TWIT} spam alert: uses Google as URL
http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/spam?te...@$twit+"; \
"http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"; 1>/dev/null

Twitter is futzing with the URL part, so what is received is
completely useless. Here is an example for "5V7RTG" (another "free
iPhone" spammer)

@5V7RTG spam alert: uses Google as URL 5V7RTG" rel="nofollow"
target="_blank">http://twitter.com/direct_m...


Can someone un-do this change? There is no reason to add either
"nofollow" or "target" to these links, and you've FUBAR'd the entire
URL as a consequence.

I would like the DM to be sent just as I've requested, without Twitter
"improving" it.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Not appearing in search results

[TjL]

I had this happen to me awhile ago for no reason that I could explain.

I put in a support request(*) and a few days later I was back in there.

Support request to http://help.twitter.com or
http://www.getsatisfaction.com/twitter not here

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Finding tweet by id only

[TjL]

This seems like it would be a fairly easy project to do, something like

http://tweetbynumber.com/0

Look up the tweet, see if it exists, if it does, display it (and cache it)


Assuming that we eventually get a way to search for replies, you could
display those too.


Is Twitter Inc going to add this?

If not, is someone else working on it?

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Friendship.create is confusing

[TjL]

"Follower" is clear (someone you follow)

 "Friend" is (kinda) clear if you know what "Follower" means

("If a Follower is someone who follows you, then a Friend must be
someone you follow.")

I understand the desire to move away from the term "Friend" as
"Someone You Follow" (as it can be confusing) but what's the better
word for it? Has anyone come up with one?

"Followees" isn't it but it's as close as I've come.


"Attention Getters" (those who get my attention) vs "Attention Givers"
(those who give their attention to me) would be another way of putting
it, but both seem too long :-)

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Pre-fill DM textarea?

[TjL]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Chris Thomson  wrote:
> This isn't documented anywhere, as far as I can tell, but
> http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/spam?text= . . . seems to work.

HEY look at that.

Thanks!

TjL

[twitter-dev] Pre-fill DM textarea?

[TjL]

I am adding links to TwitReport to be able to report someone as a dirty spambag.

This can easily be done as an @reply like this:

 http://twitter.com/home?stat...@spam+@$TWIT+

where "$TWIT" is already defined as the TwitterName of your new follower.

I can also do a DM like this

  http://twitter.com/home?status=d+sp...@$twit+

but that loads the entire /home webpage AND doesn't verify that the
person can send a DM to @spam.

I'd much rather use

http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/spam

but I want to be able to be able to pre-populate the textarea with the
@name of the Twit in question.

However, this doesn't work:

http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/spam?stat...@$twit

Is there another way or am I stuck using 'd spam'?

Thx

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Twitter People Search

[TjL]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Doug Williams  wrote:
>
> Mike,
> What criteria are you looking to use to identify interests? Words
> tweeted, information in profile bios, user names?

I'd like to be able to find people who have "google.com" as their URL,
as it is currently a good indicator that the person is a "free iPhone"
spammer.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: sending replies or DMs to people no longer following you ...

[TjL]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Jeff Bishop  wrote:

> If you send a reply or Direct Message to someone who is not following you
> then the user will not see it in their timeline or as a Direct Message
> notification (like email), correct?

/replies shows replies even from people you do not follow UNLESS you
have blocked them.

If they search Summize for their @name it will also show up there.

So really DMs are the only thing you have to worry about.


> So, what is the best way to get a list of people that will see these replies
> or DMs?  Do I  have to get the IDs from Friends and Followers and compare
> myself?  I would rather the user not send a DM or Reply if the person will
> not see it.

It's only the DMs you have to worry about.

For you to send them a DM, they must follow you.

How you test for that depends on how you send your DMs:

If you go to their Twitter page and see a link in the sidebar to send
them a message, then they follow you.

If you go to your /direct_messages page and see their name in the dropdown list

http://twitter.com/friendships/exists.xml?user_a=OTHERPERSON&user_b=SCOTT

if you get

false

then OTHERPERSON does not follow SCOTT (obviously replace Twitternames
as appropriate :)

If you get

true

then they do.

Obviously they will not be able to send YOU a DM if you don't follow them.

HTH

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Email to Twitter ID?

[TjL]

I've made a suggestion that this be left for authenticated API calls
and/or registered developers:

http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=353

I'm glad TwitterCo is being proactive in protecting this information,
but there's a lot of utility to be had keeping it for the legit users.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Email to Twitter ID?

[TjL]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Doug Williams  wrote:
>
> There is no supported way to get a user ID given an email address. The
> undocumented parameter Abraham mentioned has been deprecated and will cease
> to work shortly.

Will it be replaced by another way?

Seems like an obvious feature to be missing.

[twitter-dev] Email to Twitter ID?

[TjL]

Q: Is there a way in the API to input an email address and output a
twitter username? I couldn't see anything in the API.


Background (for those who may be interested :-)

When TwitReport gets an email-forward from a user, it comes in
basically two formats:

1) Automatically forwarded by Gmail filter

2) Not Gmail

Gmail (and perhaps some other clients) will forward and maintain all
of the headers.

Most other mail clients, including Apple's Mail.app, will forward, but
will not maintain all of the headers.

This means that the headers telling me the Twitter username of the
person who sent me the email is lost.

WITH the Twitter username of the person requesting the TwitReport, I
can show some nice relationship graphs based on mutual followers, etc.

Without that, however, the reports are a lot less interesting.

Without an API way to make this lookup, I have a few (bad) options:

1) Scrape the content of the email looking for the name by looking for
the "Hi, RealName (TwitterName)."

2) Just don't offer this improved functionality

3) Maintain my own list/database of email addresses <--> Twitter
usernames that I manually compile/update.

4) Convince all users to switch to Gmail/Google Apps

I started with #1, got frustrated and gave up, moved to #2, and am now
getting requests for this functionality so I'm thinking about #1 vs #3
although frankly #4 is the best solution :-)


TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Archive

[TjL]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Kyle Tolle  wrote:

> Is there a way to authenticate with an account even for pages that
> don't require it? If not, there definitely should be.

Sure, just always use your auth creds when you send a request.

TJL

[twitter-dev] Re: Reserved usernames

[TjL]

/account seems like it should be

/settings isn't but should be (regular user, 1 post, 4:50 PM Jun 22nd, 2008)

"twitter" usernames are not allowed *now* but used to be, FYI.

TJL

[twitter-dev] Re: update_profile_image gives me head ache

[TjL]

FWIW, I've had trouble uploading a profile picture using the web
interface itself (it seems to accept it, but then doesn't show it). It
hardly seems like the most robust feature. Normally I just keep trying
and waiting a few minutes to see if it actually went through.

[twitter-dev] Re: getting replies to user if user is not following the replying user

[TjL]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Matt Sanford  wrote:
>
> I think it does if you use: @user -to:user

OH YAY!

I've been trying to figure out how to do that.

Thanks

[twitter-dev] Re: What is 140 characters?

[TjL]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Alex Payne  wrote:
> We consider the issue neither acute nor grave.
>

UNFOLLOW.

Oh, wait, crap.

[twitter-dev] Re: What is 140 characters?

[TjL]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 7:27 PM, atebits  wrote:
>
> Just to confirm: "EXTREME prejudice" as in "140 *bytes* as defined by
> UTF-8 with HTML entity encoding only for special (< > &) characters?

Just to interject: & has not been specially encoded except for during
a brief time when " was also converted to " and counted as 5
characters and & equalled 4. This was un-done in a matter of days,
if not less.

I'd reiterate that there's no need to encode > as &rt;

If you are encoding < as < there's no risk of someone getting an
 tag or 

[twitter-dev] Re: How many accounts is too many?

[TjL]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Cameron Kaiser  wrote:
>
>> FWIW I believe that 20-30 a day is going to rate you as a "nuclear follow
>> cost"
>>
>> http://www.followcost.com
>>
>> which I point to as further evidence that this is not how Twitter
>> users intend to use Twitter.
>
> FWIW, I'm one of those so-called nuclear follow cost Twitterers, so be
> careful about what you consider excessive.

As am I, but I'd never follow a news service that was nuclear,

Also, re:

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Chad Etzel  wrote:
> Counter-example:
>
> http://twitter.com/breakingnewson
>
> posts way more than 20 times a day, posts no (or very few) links, and
> has 31k+ followers.

Yes, similar to CNN, which is why I included their data.

I'm not claiming to be normative, I just don't see what Twitter brings
that would be better than an email list for this purpose when the
information clearly won't fit in 140 characters.

RSS would be a better technology, email would have a lower barrier to entry.

Using Twitter because Twitter is popular is the wrong reason to use
Twitter, and I think it misses what Twitter has to offer that makes it
different than RSS/Email.

Just throwing your stuff on Twitter because you've got the technical
know-how misses the point.

And with that, I will officially shut up.

About this.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: How many accounts is too many?

[TjL]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Clinton  wrote:
>
>> You're confusing Twitter with RSS.
>>
>> RSS is a way to "push" this type of information out to people.
>>
>> Twitter is the wrong tool.
>
> Well, is it? Yes, you're right, I AM thinking of using this like RSS,
> but is that necessarily wrong?

If you ask just about anyone who uses Twitter a lot, they would tell
you yes, it is wrong.

Google "twitter is not rss" (including the quotes) and read some of the results.

RSS is RSS. People who want RSS go to RSS.

What's the advantage of Twitter? That people can get them via SMS? Not
at the rates you're talking about publishing.

With the exception of "Breaking News" I don't see any sort of purpose
to duplicate what RSS provides via Twitter.



> To put it in context, there are lots of people who read the day's
> obituaries (or other family announcements) in their daily newspaper. I
> could imagine these people being interested in receiving a list of new
> notices daily.

Sounds like a perfect job for a daily email digest. I'd sign up for
one of those if my local paper provided it.

I would not, however, sign up for their Twitter feed.

Seriously, I'm not trying to be a PITA or smart-aleck.

There's not enough info in 140 characters to tell me what I need to
know, so all you can do is post a name, age, and a link to your
website.

You are probably not going to send any "Breaking News! Maybelle Lewis,
90, died" updates. Once a day is plenty.

I'd MUCH rather give you my email address and get the daily digest
where I can get the full obit (and you can stick some other marketing
information in the email if you'd like :-)

> My previous number of 3,500 was the number of new notices across a
> whole site (which consists of many newspapers), but for individual
> newspapers, we're talking about anything between 0 and 100 per day-
> usually more like 20-30.  That is manageable.

FWIW I believe that 20-30 a day is going to rate you as a "nuclear follow cost"

http://www.followcost.com

which I point to as further evidence that this is not how Twitter
users intend to use Twitter.


>> If you/they are determined to do this, then the best way to do it
>> ("least-worst") solution is to make it so that you are sending the
>> fewest number of status updates as possible which are as specific as
>> possible.
>
> Sure. In this context, that amounts to a tweet for each new notice
> that is published - any less and we'd just be sending stats: "20 new
> obituaries", which is meaningless to everybody.

Yes, but

"Obituaries for John Smith, Kelly Green, Joseph Smith, Al Jones, [and
so on] http://tr.im/";

would be better than 10 separate posts



> I'd welcome other ideas for how to incorporate twitter into the site,
> or pointers to useful implementations by other companies.

How other companies are using Twitter might be a good thing to checkout.

Look at http://twitter.com/zappos for example.

They aren't link-blasting you with sale information or special promo
codes. It's an actual person typing in actual messages, making
connections with actual people.

On the other side, there is http://twitter.com/cnn who has 34,561
followers, but even they posting less than 20 times a day. And they're
CNN.

Look at how Rachel Maddow is using it http://twitter.com/maddow
Pointers to her show but not JUST that.

If there is an on-scene reporter who wants to take on an official
Twitter account, that'd be one thing, but if it's going to be
automated, I think it's missing the point.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Using curl with Twitter

[TjL]

Ok, well, I'll just try to stay current with future developments.

The only password that I ever need with BasicAuth and my programs is my own.

My programs need to be able to run unattended on the commandline
(triggered my procmail, for those who know what that is).

If there isn't a way to do that, I don't have a plan B.

I realize you're already aware of these potential problems, I'm just
processing it now.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: How many accounts is too many?

[TjL]

> I'm very new to the twitter world, but it seems that most people don't
> use any form of filtering, so 1,000-3,500 notices per day in a single
> twitter feed would be excessive :)

My unsolicited opinion is this:

You're confusing Twitter with RSS.

RSS is a way to "push" this type of information out to people.

Twitter is the wrong tool.

Now if you're working for a client who insists that they've heard
about this Twitter "thing" and they want to get their stuff on
Twitter, that's fine.

But it sounds like a recipe for a whole lot of work and very few followers.

That's my opinion.

If you/they are determined to do this, then the best way to do it
("least-worst") solution is to make it so that you are sending the
fewest number of status updates as possible which are as specific as
possible.

You're welcome to try, but no one NO ONE is going to read 10,000
of these per week.

I'd go on, but "how to use Twitter" is really OT for the list.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Using curl with Twitter

[TjL]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Doug Williams  wrote:
> As Alex stated above, we know cURL usage will break if and when basic
> authentication support is wholly discontinued. It's something we're
> equally concerned about and something we would like to avoid. Stay
> tuned.

OK, I guess my next question is this:

Why turn off basic auth once OAuth is enabled?

Why not just leave them both?

(Not trying to be flip, I don't understand what's wrong with having
both "doors".)

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Using curl with Twitter

[TjL]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Alex Payne  wrote:
> We're discussing a local proxy that could be used for testing. It's
> definitely a known problem.

Um, am I reading this correctly?

is 'curl --netrc' not going to work anymore once OAuth is implemented?

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Introducing Doug Williams, Twitter API Support

[TjL]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Alex Payne  wrote:
> Give Doug a warm welcome!
>

@welcome @dougw @!

:-)

[twitter-dev] Using curl with Twitter

[TjL]

I'm not sure how many other people know this, so my apologies if this
is "Duh" material, but I've never worked much with curl before (always
been a lynx man :-)

If you use 'curl --netrc' curl will check ~/.netrc for your Twitter
login information.

Just enter your Twitter login information like this:

machine twitter.com
login twitreport
password SuPerSEkret

Obviously change 'twitreport' to your Twittername and 'SuPerSEkret' to
your password.  It can all be on one line if you prefer.

The nice thing is that this keeps your password from appearing in 'ps'
and you don't have to type it in each time, just add --netrc and it
will happen automatically.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: OT - where's the proper place to talk about search.twitter.com?

[TjL]

The more I think about this, the more I realize that there really
ought to be a "logged in" version of Twitter Search.

Not that you would HAVE to login, but IF you were logged in:

People you have BLOCKED would not appear.

People who have private accounts you follow WOULD appear.

That way you could just block bots and have them excluded from results.

Personal choice, FTW.

Now it just needs to be implemented :-)

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: OT - where's the proper place to talk about search.twitter.com?

[TjL]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 11:20 PM, Chad Etzel  wrote:
>
> On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 9:04 PM, TjL  wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Cameron Kaiser  wrote:
>>>
>>>> IMO, "trend bots" should have to be registered with Twitter (they say
>>>> what they are going to use their API access for, right?) and should
>>>> excluded from Twitter search.
>>>
>>> How do you enforce bots registering as bots, however?
>>
>> Well, revoking API whitelisting for any that don't register properly
>> would be a good first step.
>
> Huh? Bots don't need any sort of whitelisting to exist or function.
> It's trivial to create and run one.  It won't be so trivial once OAuth
> hits, but I'm sure it won't be much of a barrier.

Ah. Well. My mistake.

Thanks

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: OT - where's the proper place to talk about search.twitter.com?

[TjL]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Cameron Kaiser  wrote:
>
>> IMO, "trend bots" should have to be registered with Twitter (they say
>> what they are going to use their API access for, right?) and should
>> excluded from Twitter search.
>
> How do you enforce bots registering as bots, however?

Well, revoking API whitelisting for any that don't register properly
would be a good first step.

Just a checkbox/radio button on the API whitelisting form should do.

That will deal with any new ones.

As for existing ones, well, just a matter of watching the Trending
Topics and ID'ing trending bots.

Add a banner on search.twitter.com which links to a blog post on the
Twitter blog for more information.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: OT - where's the proper place to talk about search.twitter.com?

[TjL]

Here's the latest example of bots drowning out actual posts:

http://tntluoma.com/temp/TrendBots.png (screenshot)

Of 11 visible results:

4 are actual content (although 2 are ReTweets, which is another issue
altogether, but at least they are humans)

7 are bots.

Almost 2x as many bots as actual results.


IMO, "trend bots" should have to be registered with Twitter (they say
what they are going to use their API access for, right?) and should
excluded from Twitter search.

If people want to FOLLOW one of the Trend bots, fine, but they are
choking the usefulness of the trending topics list and with nothing
but echoing noise.

It's getting as bad as trying to go to Google to find hotel information.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: OT - where's the proper place to talk about search.twitter.com?

[TjL]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Doug Williams  wrote:
> In your experience, do trending bots have a disproportionate
> participation in the search results for trending topics? Have you done
> any analysis like that?

I'm not Chad :-) but if you click on any of the Trending Topics and
watch for any length of time you'll see scads of trending topic bots
popping up.

I think the most I counted at one point was like 12 out of the top 20 results.

It's insane.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: friends_timeline.xml?count= not working? (JSON is)

[TjL]

BAH! It was indeed "pilot error". Sorry for the noise.

That's what I get for coding at 4am.

TjL

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 10:19 AM, TjL  wrote:
> I'm getting weird results. Sometimes I'm getting 'count' honored, and
> sometimes getting 20 regardless of what I ask for.
>
> Still checking to make sure it's not "pilot error" before I open a bug
> report.
> Tj
> On Mar 6, 2009, at 10:10 AM, Matt Sanford  wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>     That looks like a bug, please open a Google Code issue
> (http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/entry) and we'll take a look.
> — Matt
> On Mar 6, 2009, at 01:05 AM, TjL wrote:
>
> is 'count' not working for friends timeline if you use XML?
>
> I read this:
>
> http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#friendstimeline
>
> URL: http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.format
> Formats: xml, json, rss, atom
> Method(s): GET
> API Limit: 1 per request
> Parameters:
> {{edit}}
> count.  Optional.  Specifies the number of statuses to retrieve. May
> not be greater than 200.  Ex:
> http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=5
>
> and did this:
>
> curl -s --netrc
> 'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=50' >
> /tmp/EVERYTHING.xml
>
> and got 20, not 50.
>
> curl -s --netrc
> 'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.json?count=50' >
> /tmp/EVERYTHING.json
>
> seemed to work, up to count=200
>
>

[twitter-dev] Re: friends_timeline.xml?count= not working? (JSON is)

[TjL]

I'm getting weird results. Sometimes I'm getting 'count' honored, and  
sometimes getting 20 regardless of what I ask for.


Still checking to make sure it's not "pilot error" before I open a bug  
report.


Tj

On Mar 6, 2009, at 10:10 AM, Matt Sanford  wrote:


Hi there,

That looks like a bug, please open a Google Code issue (http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/entry 
) and we'll take a look.


— Matt

On Mar 6, 2009, at 01:05 AM, TjL wrote:



is 'count' not working for friends timeline if you use XML?

I read this:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#friendstimeline

URL: http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.format
Formats: xml, json, rss, atom
Method(s): GET
API Limit: 1 per request
Parameters:
{{edit}}
count.  Optional.  Specifies the number of statuses to retrieve. May
not be greater than 200.  Ex:
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=5

and did this:

curl -s --netrc
'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=50' >
/tmp/EVERYTHING.xml

and got 20, not 50.

curl -s --netrc
'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.json?count=50' >
/tmp/EVERYTHING.json

seemed to work, up to count=200

[twitter-dev] Re: Twitter API Function

[TjL]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 1:04 AM, pawan  wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
>         Can any one explain me how I get the perticuler user block or
> not for another user by the help of API.
>  Just like we get friendship exists or not.

Do you mean the list of all people who PersonX follows or is followed by?

I think you want

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#SocialGraphMethods

TjL

[twitter-dev] friends_timeline.xml?count= not working? (JSON is)

[TjL]

is 'count' not working for friends timeline if you use XML?

I read this:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#friendstimeline

URL: http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.format
Formats: xml, json, rss, atom
Method(s): GET
API Limit: 1 per request
Parameters:
{{edit}}
count.  Optional.  Specifies the number of statuses to retrieve. May
not be greater than 200.  Ex:
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=5

and did this:

curl -s --netrc
'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?count=50' >
/tmp/EVERYTHING.xml

and got 20, not 50.

curl -s --netrc
'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.json?count=50' >
/tmp/EVERYTHING.json

seemed to work, up to count=200

[twitter-dev] OT - where's the proper place to talk about search.twitter.com?

[TjL]

Specifically

1) There are WAY to many "trending topic" bots which fill search
results with useless clutter

2) I'd love to see a "trending topics" list that does NOT include hash
tags, you know, to find out what ordinary people are talking about :-)

I know this is the wrong place for it (sorry) but I'm not sure where else to go.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: How to get started

[TjL]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Omer rosen  wrote:
> I still don't understand how to do the first step. What do I do with
> the curl?

Go to http://twitreport.tntluoma.com and read some of the scripts and
it will show you how to use curl.

Start by putting this into a file ~/.netrc in your $HOME

machine twitter.com
login luomat
password SEcREt

change 'luomat' to your Twittername and 'SEcREt' to your Twitter
password. Then do:

chmod 600 ~/.netrc

Then you can start to experiment with some of the curl scripts that
you see there.  I'd suggest looking at 'doesfollow' and 'id-to-name'
as some good basic ones.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: Destroying tweets issue for games

[TjL]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 9:57 AM, kprobe  wrote:
>
> Using DM will cause a different problem. If I tweet a clue every few
> minutes, each person will have a stack of DM's in their profile to
> delete. This will be inconvenient to delete constantly. What games
> developers need is a better way of communicating with players.
>

Well, with Twitter you've got @replies and DMs. If you don't want
either of those, not sure what to offer.

[twitter-dev] Re: How often do users change their screen names?

[TjL]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Nick Arnett  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

[twitter-dev] Re: How to get started

[TjL]

You can find a lot of examples that use curl on the commandline (that
is, not with PHP) at

http://twitreport.tntluoma.com

FWIW

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: "in reply to" metadata missing for manual replies

[TjL]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 9:51 PM, simX  wrote:
>> And yes, if their twitter client makes "real" replies too hard, they
>> should be updated to make it easier or they should fall into disuse.
>
> This is just arrogant.  This is completely false.

Call it whatever you want. I call it my logical conclusion.


> When someone wants
> to reply to me, typing five characters, "@simX" is *far* faster than
> moving your mouse to target a tiny little reply swoosh.  It takes a
> whole second to move your hand to the mouse, when you can type those 5
> characters in under a second if you're a fast typer.  Saying that
> users who refuse to jump through the UI hoops are somehow inferior is
> lame and condescending.

You're talking to someone who used PINE for years after people had
moved on to graphical mail clients, and whose major complaint about
Mac OS X is that it isn't as easy as Windows in using command keys
(even though I have lots of my own set) and purchased a program called
KeyCue to make it easier for me to use the keyboard instead of the
mouse.

Telling me I don't understand the value of keyboard usage just makes
you sound like an uninformed idiot, if you want to start calling each
other names.

If someone is reading Twitter on the website, they are already using
the mouse, as there is no way to move back and forth between pages by
the keyboard.  They are (more than likely) using the scrollbar by
either using their mouse or their mouse scrollbar.  So the idea of
moving their mouse 2" to click the "swoosh" (which I agree could be
bigger and which I'd agree should NOT be hidden by default which I
think was a lousy change by Twitter, Inc and makes it harder for
people to know where they are aiming for.

In addition they are in all likelihood going to have to use their
mouse to get into the textarea at the top of the screen in the first
place.

So your argument of mouse vs keyboard use doesn't even convince ME, an
avid keyboard user.


> Not only that, but humans often make mistakes
> and simply forget to target a specific tweet.  Losing the context
> because of simple human error is unnecessary.

Instead you just want to add extra unnecessary metadata and then have
programmers try to guess what the original intention was.


> The mere fact that there are genuine replies that don't have the
> in_reply_to_status_id metadata set demonstrates that the new interface
> should not completely replace the old functionality.

Maybe to you, who is convinced that every Twitter client programmer
should be expected to write extra code because someone is too lazy to
move their mouse 2 extra inches to click the arrow.

And what AI are they going to use to determine whether this extra
metadata or lack thereof means that this is an actual reply?  They're
going to go whichever they prefer.

Meaning that they are going to get a different result for
'conversations' depending on whether they use Summize (which is going
to have to choose one method) or some other client.

It's possible that I might have one client on my desktop that does it
one way and another client on my iPhone that does it another way.

OR, we have one way that works the same on every client.

I choose consistency as a better alternative.

Sorry if you don't agree, but telling me that I don't understand your
argument is what I find arrogant and completely false.

I'm just not convinced by it.

TjL

[twitter-dev] Re: "in reply to" metadata missing for manual replies

[TjL]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 4:38 PM, atebits  wrote:

> 1. If a client is making users jump through hoops to reply to a
> specific tweet, the client is doing it wrong.

[snip]

> The end of auto-linking was a fantastic change for two reasons: 1. it
> keeps everything simple (no new settings or flags or functionality),
> 2. it allows developers to trust in_reply_to_status_id, paving the way
> for some *really* fantastic stuff down the road.


Agreed on both points.

I like the possibilities for actual conversation threading (not yet
realized in summize searches but you can see the potential)

With the exception that m.twitter.com really needs to get a "reply"
button that works properly.

If people are too lazy, well... tough.  Just like proper mail
filtering/threading, if they can't be bothered to figure out how it
works, they'll lose some of the advantages that the software can
provide for them.

If they are using outdated software, then all sorts of things may
break, including favorites (broken in an earlier version of
Twitterrific when the API changed). Again, tough.

There *should* be a way to start a "conversation chain" without
setting an in-reply-to being added where it doesn't belong. That's
where it makes sense that you would type in @NAME by hand.

Twitter shouldn't be held hostage to "the way it used to be" for a
feature which was clearly broken by indicating a relationship between
two posts when there was none.  Neither should they be held hostage to
"Users are too lazy to do it the right way."

And yes, if their twitter client makes "real" replies too hard, they
should be updated to make it easier or they should fall into disuse.

TjL