Re: Twitter Whitelisting / Identifier - how long does the review take?
I think it would be great if the part of the API docs (or wherever it is) that tells you how to get an identifier were expanded to cover this sort of question. It comes up over and over again, so it's clear the docs could be more helpful and/or more prominent. Terry
Re: IP ranges from The Planet will be blocked
A little off-topic: Have Twitter detected abuse coming from Amazon EC2 IP address ranges? I'm not building a Twitter app, but I'm very curious to know what the reputation of Amazon's IP blocks is like. I imagine Amazon have plenty of EC2 instances running code written by evildoers. I wonder what they're like at reacting to reports of abuse etc. This also includes people using them for SMTP (of course). Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: 24,386 unfollow calls
Hi Zac Zac == Zac Bowling zbowl...@gmail.com writes: My boss, who is following 24,386 people (and has 22,752 followers) came to me and wanted me to hack something to wipe out all the people he follows so he can start clean again for various reasons. ... you can contact me off list at z...@seesmic.com You have a Seesmic address, and your boss follows 24K people and wants to unfollow them all H. So, uh, why does Loic hate us? :-) Not so long ago we were all his friends! You might suggest he try Tweetdeck. That would let him nicely keep up to date with just the people and topics he really wants to read, without the mass unfollow. Of course you guys might have to buy Tweetdeck too before that could happen :-) Or if he really does want to start again, just delete the account and recreate it. That would have a certain appealing symmetry. Regards, Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: 24,386 unfollow calls
Hi Zac Loic loves everyone, but he had an auto-follow bot that followed everyone that followed him. Got a little crazy. Sorry, I don't buy that for a second :-) Looks to me like a Twitter personality overhaul. I mean who do you want to be, someone with 24K followers who just follows a very small number of people, or someone at 24K/24K? What's the first (ok, second) thing you look at when you're assessing a Twitter user's page? Just when you think the old-fashioned concept of friendship, as translated to the online world, couldn't be more thoroughly or cynically degraded... :-) Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: scripts to show Overlapping Circles of friends/followers
TjL == TjL luo...@gmail.com writes: TjL I've made part of TwitReport into 3 different programs (well, TjL scripts really) so that they can be more easily used. TjL Give two Twitter users, show me how many [and who] follows both of them TjL Given two Twitter users, show me how many [and who] we both follow TjL Given two Twitter users, show me how many [and who] A follows who TjL B also follows Hi TjL. I wrote some Python to do a similar thing. You, or anyone else, is welcome to the code. See http://www.fluidinfo.com/terry/2008/10/13/digging-into-twitter-following/ Here's an example of the (HTML) output, comparing @aweissman to @johnborthwick: http://www.fluidinfo.com/terry-twitter/aweissman-johnborthwick.html Terry
[twitter-dev] I get new follower mails, but I'm not followed
Hi all I've been getting a lot of mails telling me people are following me, but when I click to take a look at the person I am not being followed by them. At first I just assumed this was some kind of eventual consistency issue with Twitter and that the web interface was showing the person with a slightly out of date follower list. When I check with the API I also don't see the person as following me. I've seen this (I guess) 20 times in the last few days. I'm wondering what's going on. Is it just spammers (or others) creating accounts, following many people, then immediately unfollowing? I also read about the StalkDaily worm, so (if the worm exists and works as described) I suppose if you wanted to infect people you could create new accounts and then just follow/unfollow people. See http://kodespark.tumblr.com/post/95149076/the-stalkdaily-worm-on-twitter Often twitter.com with show the person who's apparently following (but isn't or no longer is) as following a high numeric number, but the number of little icons of people they're following will be much much smaller. That, I think, is just Twitter not having caught up with itself. Anyway, I'm just commenting out loud, and wondering whether others are seeing this. I imagine it must be widespread. Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: I get new follower mails, but I'm not followed
Hi Alex This is the first I've heard of it, but I'll double-check with our spam team. If you've not heard anything, it's likely just coincidence. In any case, here are some of my apparently phantom follows from the last couple of days: JTNVEGAS, Raine93, BartGA, ronquart, shrryfllr People don't usually unfollow so rapidly. I don't know how much of a delay Twitter has in outgoing SMTP, but some of the above I have checked immediately on receiving the follow notification in mail, and I've not been on their following list. Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: I get new follower mails, but I'm not followed
Here's another one, just in this minute. Terry From: Twitter twitter-follow-terry=jon...@postmaster.twitter.com Subject: Molly Gould is now following you on Twitter! Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:59:49 + To: terry Hi, Terry Jones (terrycojones). Molly Gould (mollygould) is now following your updates on Twitter. Check out Molly Gould's profile here: http://twitter.com/mollygould You may follow Molly Gould as well by clicking on the follow button. Best, Twitter
[twitter-dev] Re: I get new follower mails, but I'm not followed
Hi Alex. Here's another one, just in. I wont send any more, I'm sure you get the point :-) Terry From: Twitter twitter-follow-terry=jon...@postmaster.twitter.com Subject: Mike Melnick is now following you on Twitter! Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:26:49 + Hi, Terry Jones (terrycojones). Mike Melnick (Houstonchirodoc) is now following your updates on Twitter. Check out Mike Melnick's profile here: http://twitter.com/Houstonchirodoc You may follow Mike Melnick as well by clicking on the follow button. Best, Twitter -- Turn off these emails at: http://twitter.com/account/notifications
[twitter-dev] Re: I get new follower mails, but I'm not followed
Hi Andrew Out of curiosity, have you signed up for any of those autofollower apps or bots or programs? No. This could all just be coincidence - that people are in fact following me, and then unfollowing soon after for some reason. We don't know how much latency there is in Twitter's outgoing SMTP notifications. Twitter could presumably look at the examples I've given and see what those users did - did they follow many and unfollow them all (the last one I got was from someone (now) not following anyone)? Or did they just follow me in particular and then unfollow me? Anyway, this is not API related, so I'll let it drop until/unless there's news back from Alex. Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: Spamming via addition of trending words to tweets
Zac Good to know before I started spamming @spam with my own log data. Right. When Twitter becomes a religion, I'm sure they'll set up an account where apps can go to confess that they're spammers. Until then you'll have to wait :-) Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: A question regarding categorization of tweets
This is not an API question, but I don't know where else to ask it... Twitter recently changed their web setup. When I click on the followers link when I logged in on http://twitter.com I get a page of followers and choose between List and Expanded views. My first problem is that when I click on the follow icon next to a user's name, nothing happens. The generic gray avatar icon I click on (with the little + sign on it) flashes, but that's it. Second problem: when I go to that user's page (http://twitter.com/zooko in this case) and click on the Follow button, nothing happens. Third problem (related?): When I click on a Trending Topic link, I get taken to a new page that asks What are you doing?, has the usual update box, has the normal right sidebar - but which has no tweets on it at all. Fourth (related?): When I type a tweet into the update box, I no longer see a counter showing me how many chars I have left. It almost feels like I have a systematic problem with Javascript. But I'm using a stock Firefox (Ubuntu Linux Hardy 8.04 fully apt-get updated) 3.0.12. I have tried this with all FF extensions disabled. I have Javascript enabled. The rest of my web browsing seems fine, no problems with other sites AFAIK. It feels weird to be asking here about such fundamental problems. I haven't seen anyone else bring them up, so I imagine I have something weird going on. Or are there really so few people left on the planet using the regular web interface to Twitter? :-) Thanks for any help / suggestions. Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: A question regarding categorization of tweets
Clearing my firefox browser cache solved this. Thanks to @emileifrem Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: OK Seriously People
Stuart == Stuart stut...@gmail.com writes: Stuart * I can't believe you lot don't realise that constantly demanding Stuart status updates, while certainly important to you, is little more Stuart than a distraction for those who are actually fighting the good Stuart fight. I woke up this morning with the thought that the Twitter mailing list has now become part of the DDoS. What percentage of the people complaining loudly and increasing the general stress/pressure level are actually bots? :-) Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: Tweepy -- python library
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 9:50 AM, Josh Roessleinjroessl...@gmail.com wrote: Hello twitter developers: Hi Josh That's great, it looks very clean. I'll give it a try soon. BTW, you raise NotImplemented in (at least) cache.py. That should instead be raise NotImplementedError. Terry
[twitter-dev] Re: Cease Desist from Twitter
To be fair, the new version mostly seemed to please the guy I was on the phone with, but I got the impression he was shooting from the hip when he said that I would probably need to change the blue in the logo. Law firms bill by the hour.
[twitter-dev] API call accounting by account rather than IP for non-authenticated requests
I just submitted a whitelisting request, along with a comment along the following lines: I think it would be good if Twitter did API call accounting based on the HTTP auth header whenever one is sent - even if the call itself does not require auth. I'm at home right now and although my account (@terrycojones) is whitelisted, my home IP is not. So while I can make a decent number of authenticated calls, I can't do much with the app I'm trying to write as it's making non-authenticated calls. The non-authenticated calls are accounted for by IP. Even if my home IP were whitelisted, I'd be stuck if I were in a hotel. The concrete suggestion is: to always do API call accounting based on the passed auth details, and if no auth information is passed, then fall back to IP-based accounting. That wouldn't change much and is backwards compatible. Auth requiring calls would be just as they were. But in the case of non-auth requiring calls, the developer would have the choice: send auth to get account based accounting, don't send it to get IP based accounting. Terry
[twitter-dev] Overall flow in writing an app with a Tweet this capability
Hi all I'm writing an app that will give the user a way to tweet results via OAuth. I think I understand the steps involved but I'd like to be sure. Here's a summary of what I plan to do. A first thing to know is that I plan to use a cookie to know whether a user has previously used our app. - If a user's browser send our cookie, we'll use it to look up the user's Access Token and screename, we display their screenname and we know how to tweet on their behalf. It seems that long-term storage of Access Tokens is encouraged, although they're obviously something to be careful with. Using a cookie to indicate that you've used our site before leaves open the possibility for mischief if a user's cookies are compromised in some way. Are there better ways to do this? - If the browser doesn't send a cookie, we display a sign in with Twitter icon http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Sign-in-with-Twitter which when clicked initiates the OAuth dance, resulting in us having an Access Token. We use that (and our Consumer info) to call account/verify_credentials and from the result of that we can extract the user's screenname. We push a cookie back to the browser for use next time. As I read it, using OAuth does *not* in general result in the Consumer getting to know the user's name on the Service Provider. Is that correct? Some apps may not need to know it (e.g., you can let the user try to navigate to a protected resource and you just send the right headers and you're in), but in this case we'd like to know it - perhaps just to display the user's screenname, or to pass a screenname or id to a method that doesn't require auth but which does require a user name. Can someone confirm that the above sequence of events is sensible? BTW, I'm not looking for explanation of OAuth itself, I'm pretty sure I understand what's required there, and there are plenty of code samples around. Terry
Re: [twitter-dev] Twitter OAuth works fine in my app then I get error when trying to login to Twitter.com site
Following up to myself: Yes I experience the same. Not sure what causes it... I see the same thing. The browser location bar shows http://twitter.com/oauth/authorize when you have the error page up. So something is redirecting us to the /oauth when we try a normal web login. Digging a little, I see a twitter.com _twitter_sess cookie is pushed to my browser by Twitter when I'm redirected to the auth page in step 2. The cookie is set to expire at end of session. Maybe that should be changed to have it expire in a couple of minutes, or maybe that cookie shouldn't be pushed to us at all. Does it interfere with signing in with a second 3rd party app? If I remove that cookie before going to Twitter in step 3, it all works fine. 1) Make sure you are logged out of twitter.com 2) Use a third party app to login to twitter 3) Open a second tab, go to twitter.com and login. You should get the error message above? Terry
Re: [twitter-dev] hits, visits, etc to my tweets
Frank == Frank gn...@windstream.net writes: Frank Is there any way the number of hits on my tweet? I am interested Frank only in the number of folks who have viewed or visited ... not the Frank names nor the numbers of posts? This might include mostly Frank unregistered viewers If your tweet includes a bit.ly link, you can go to the bit.ly URL with a + sign appended, and see stats there. Terry
[twitter-dev] API and web UI differ on access to protected users' friends
This seems inconsistent: The API docs (http://bit.ly/TVwXI) state that to successfully call /statuses/friends on a protected user, you must authenticate and be allowed to see the user. OTOH, twitter.com lets you see the friends/followers list of protected users if you're simply logged in - no need to be granted access by the user. Terry
[twitter-dev] Tickery
Apologies if this seems spammy. We just released a Twitter search and exploration app: http://tickery.net It might be of interest to fellow Twitter API programmers because you can add to the underlying objects (representing Twitter users), search on your additions and those of others, etc. E.g., if you wanted to add a rating to Twitter users, you could, and Tickery could do search display for you. Or you could write an app that did display, with the data living in FluidDB along with the data Tickery puts there. I'd love to chat with anyone who has wished that the Twitter API was in some way writable. More info: http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/fluidDB/2010/01/21/meet-tickery/ http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/fluidDB/2010/01/21/tickery-for-programmers/ Terry (@terrycojones)
Re: [twitter-dev] Twitter Engineering Blog
Really very cool. http://engineering.twitter.com/ But they should have called it Inside The Whale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_the_Whale Terry
