I'm sure Taylor or Matt will reply politely to this rant. I don't work
for Twitter, so I'd like to take on your attitude of entitlement
directly towards this free service. Your basic approach can be summed
up as How dare Twitter have problems in a totally free API that I can
use to build a business on! First of all, this service is free,
second there is an easy workaround for this.
- You collect the tweets from the search API and store the user name,
which is delivered correctly, along with the tweet info. You also get
the avatar image. So you have enough now to display the tweet.
- You then run a background process which waits until you have 100
user names, and requests their correct user info from the REST API.
This can be stored in a separate user table.
- This same process goes back to the tweets and updates each one with
the correct user id.
- You now have a valid relational database with a table for tweets,
and a table for users.
While this isn't perfect, it isn't hard to do either. At 100 users per
request, and as long as you only request data for users you haven't
seen before, there is no problem back filling this user data within
the rate limits.
Now, back to your attitude. The Twitter API is free. I agree that they
should fix search, but it is acquired code, and my bet is that they
want to rewrite it rather than patch it. The real point is that it is
free. It is not a right granted to you to always have perfect code
delivered to you.
Twitter benefits from you writing code against there API, and you
benefit from getting the data for free. Be grateful. Chill.
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Corey Ballou ball...@gmail.com wrote:
I just wanted to bring group-wide awareness to the fact that search
results from Twitter do not return an actual user_id. This has been a
known defect (and yes, I do believe it's a *very large* defect) going
on over 2 years now.
This is a call to arms to get this shit fixed. I can't believe it's
marked as an enhancement. There's nobody else to blame for providing
a return param of from_user that doesn't actually map to an actual
user. For those of us storing relational data, you're costing
precious API calls for those users who are still utilizing the search
API. The streaming API is not sufficient for all use cases, so that's
not a valid answer.
Below is the direct link to the issue tracker.
https://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=214
--
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
--
Adam Green
Twitter API Consultant and Trainer
http://140dev.com
@140dev
--
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
