Re: [twitter-dev] At Reply Spam
On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 8:31 AM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com 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: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
Re: [twitter-dev] At Reply Spam
On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 11:45 AM, Arnaud Meunier arn...@twitter.com 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: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
Re: [twitter-dev] Does user X follow user Y?
On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 1:06 PM, Dave Methvin dave.meth...@gmail.com 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: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: At Reply Spam
On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com 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: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
Re: [twitter-dev] Does user X follow user Y?
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 dave.meth...@gmail.com 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=rid00zsource_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] What's happening with Tweetie for Mac
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Isaiah Carew isa...@me.com 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.
[twitter-dev] Re: Rate Limit: Two accounts on single machine or the limit for the IP of machine with those accounts? - thats the question!
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 atulskulka...@gmail.com 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?
On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Chad Etzel c...@twitter.com 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?
On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Michael Ivey michael.i...@gmail.com 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] Re: linespaces / whitespace being removed: bug or feature?
On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Chad Etzel c...@twitter.com 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] linespaces / whitespace being removed: bug or feature?
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
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Neicole neic...@trustneicole.com 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: Deleting a Retweeted Tweet
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Joseph Cheek jos...@cheek.com 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: What is 140 characters?
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 1:07 AM, Matt Sanford m...@twitter.com 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?
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 Paynea...@twitter.com wrote: Unfortunately, nothing definitive. We're still looking into this. On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 07:56, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com 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 a...@twitter.com 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 craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: Some discussion about this thread popped up on Twitter yesterday: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/ 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: http://twitter.com/gnitset/status/1286202252 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 lt;, 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 lt;) 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 lt; and gt; entities are. It took me a LONG time to figure out what was going on here. 2) 140 Unicode _multi-byte_ characters: http://twitter.com/atebits/ 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?
caching is the best answer i have found On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 9:01 PM, dizidglasw...@gmail.com 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: DM Length
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Dewald Pretoriusdpr...@gmail.com 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] Re: Early developer preview: Retweeting API
(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?
On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 2:37 AM, Chad Etzelc...@twitter.com 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] friends timeline change: Temporary or permanent?
I just tried this curl -D - -s --netrc 'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?since_id=3166251802count=200' and got back this: HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Content-Length: 0 Location: /statuses/friends_timeline.xml?since_id=3166251802count=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
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!?
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 7:27 AM, chinaski007chinaski...@gmail.com 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
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 htmlbodyYou are being a href=http://twitter.com/login;redirected/a./body/html (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] New Shell Script to Get Mentions via Email
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?
OK, so I'm doing something wrong here: curl -D - -s -u tj:SECKRET \ -d text=BstTwt: #10085; @tj Her:quot;The lightbulbs are over the dryerquot; Me:quot;The rooster flies east at dawnquot; Her:quot;What?quot; Me: quot;Oh, I thought we were talking like spiesquot; 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 amp; or quot;) 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 quot; into a that will confuse this too. Thanks TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: Public ID to Name Lookup website?
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] Re: Our own redirecting URL is being changed to a bit.ly URL
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Cameron Kaiser spec...@floodgap.com 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: Send @replies/mentions via SMS?
On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Derek Gathright drg...@gmail.com 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] Re: Send @replies/mentions via SMS?
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] Notifications info vague/wrong
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 notifications0/notifications and $ curl --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show.json?screen_name=moltz; returns notifications:0 if I turn OFF notifications, XML returns notificationsfalse/notifications 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] Send @replies/mentions via SMS?
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?
*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 m...@twitter.com 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 m...@twitter.com 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 nore...@twitter.com then it changed to Twitter twitter-follow-emailname=domain@postmaster.twitter.com then it changed to Twitter nore...@twitter.com 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] DM via curl?
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-direct_messages%C2%A0new?SearchFor=direct+messagesp=4 gives this example: # curl -u user:password -d text=all your bases are belong to useuser=user_2 http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml I tried this # curl -u luomat:PASSWORD -d text=testuser=tj http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml and got this ?xml version=1.0 encoding=UTF-8? hash request/direct_messages/new.xml/request errorInvalid request./error /hash Am I missing something?
[twitter-dev] Didn't someone do a Show all followers and last tweet?
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] acceptable Profile Image Formats
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 profile_image_url is going to be either .gif or .jpg or .png? TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: sending DM to all followers?
@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] OT - Twitter Status Page and colors
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
On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Doug Williams d...@twitter.com 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] scripts to show Overlapping Circles of friends/followers
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] Re: How can I automatically retweet from a list of followed accounts?
On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Jim mccoy@gmail.com 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] id-to-name shell script updated
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] 'name' restrictions
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] Re: one-click follow
On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Matt Sanford m...@twitter.com 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: The OAuth Conundrum
On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 4:04 PM, Matt Sanford m...@twitter.com 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 :-) - @TI 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 scriptsJ
[twitter-dev] Why is cruft getting injected into links sent by DM?!
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=_blankhttp://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: Why is cruft getting injected into links sent by DM?!
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] http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.format and http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.format
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: http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.format and http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.format
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] Re: Not appearing in search results
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: sending replies or DMs to people no longer following you ...
On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Jeff Bishop jeff.bis...@gmail.com 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=OTHERPERSONuser_b=SCOTT if you get friendsfalse/friends then OTHERPERSON does not follow SCOTT (obviously replace Twitternames as appropriate :) If you get friendstrue/friends 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: Twitter People Search
On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Doug Williams d...@twitter.com 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] Pre-fill DM textarea?
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: Pre-fill DM textarea?
On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Chris Thomson chri...@chris24.ca 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] Re: Friendship.create is confusing
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: Finding tweet by id only
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] Email to Twitter ID?
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: Email to Twitter ID?
On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Doug Williams d...@twitter.com 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] Re: Email to Twitter ID?
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: Archive
On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Kyle Tolle kyle.to...@gmail.com 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: update_profile_image gives me head ache
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
On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Matt Sanford m...@twitter.com 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: Using curl with Twitter
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Alex Payne a...@twitter.com 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: Using curl with Twitter
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Doug Williams d...@twitter.com 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: How many accounts is too many?
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: How many accounts is too many?
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Clinton clin...@iannounce.co.uk 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: What is 140 characters?
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 7:27 PM, atebits loren.brich...@gmail.com 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 quot; and counted as 5 characters and amp; 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 lt; there's no risk of someone getting an img tag or a href tag to work, so maybe there is an argument for a left tag, but there's really no need to encode a right tag. Figured I'd throw that out there FWIW TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: What is 140 characters?
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Alex Payne a...@twitter.com wrote: We consider the issue neither acute nor grave. UNFOLLOW. Oh, wait, crap.
[twitter-dev] Re: OT - where's the proper place to talk about search.twitter.com?
On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 11:20 PM, Chad Etzel jazzyc...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 9:04 PM, TjL luo...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Cameron Kaiser spec...@floodgap.com 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?
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?
On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Cameron Kaiser spec...@floodgap.com 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: friends_timeline.xml?count= not working? (JSON is)
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 m...@twitter.com 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)
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 luo...@gmail.com 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 m...@twitter.com 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: OT - where's the proper place to talk about search.twitter.com?
On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Doug Williams do...@igudo.com 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: How to get started
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: How often do users change their screen names?
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Nick Arnett nick.arn...@gmail.com wrote: Question for the folks at Twitter - any stats on how often people change their screen names? In another thread, we were talking about the problem of resolving IDs to names... I'm refreshing my user data for lots of users every few days, in large part to catch screen name changes. I could start keeping track of the changes, but I have not done so yet. Excellent question, I was just wondering that myself. Intuition suggests that users would rarely change their screen names, especially if they are active. Do you have any data to support this? Anecdotally, I've seen a few-but-rare name changes in the people I follow on Twitter. Come to think of it, an API call that would give us names changed since a certain date would be very useful for avoiding the need to check everybody. Even better, return friend or follower names changed since a date. Seems like the former would be easier to provide than the latter. It'd be nice if Twitter.com would redirect names (i.e. if you go to http://twitter.com/foo it would tell you/direct you to http://twitter.com/bar) for awhile too, but that's another issue and possibly more hassle than it's worth. TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: How to get started
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Omer rosen omero...@gmail.com 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] OT - where's the proper place to talk about search.twitter.com?
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: Suspended or Deleted Account Feed ...
We had a conversation about this about a week ago which led to a feature request you may want to 'star': http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=311
[twitter-dev] Re: in reply to metadata missing for manual replies
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 4:38 PM, atebits loren.brich...@gmail.com 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
[twitter-dev] Re: Maximum length of a direct message?
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: Won't this present a problem for users who are getting their direct messages through SMS? Do they get truncated on delivery? Hi Craig :-) FWIW: Almost *all* DMs come through as two SMSes. Why? Because Direct Message from Twitter Name is prepended to the message, which counts towards the 160 character SMS limit AND (what is worse) Twitter also appends something like Use d TwitterName to reply (I left my iPhone home today or I could give you the exact message). The second SMS is almost always just the last bit of the message: d TwitterName to reply So unless Twitter stops appending the How to reply to a DM via SMS, sending a DM that is longer than 140 characters not really going to cause much of a hardship. The second SMS will simply have more actual content in it :-) And there's little to no chance that you'll reach the length of having *3* SMSes (320 characters) TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: Maximum length of a direct message?
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Alex Payne a...@twitter.com wrote: Our system may allow for DMs of longer than 140 characters, but I don't know if we'll support that in perpetuity. Hence, what's documented. The website just recently (IIRC) started to enforce the 140 characters rule in the past week or so. Before that it was possible to send longer DMs even though the counter was below 0. TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: Location ...
On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Matt Sanford m...@twitter.com wrote: Hi there, The API wiki (http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation) shows that the maximum size of 30 characters in the description of the update_profile method. There is currently a bug where it allows longer data and then after a day or so truncates it (http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=315). I have a fix ready and am hoping to get it deployed today. Thanks for the info. I had obviously missed that. I suppose this is not the place to have the Why is it limited to 30 characters? discussion, so I'll let that go. TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: Hot to identify mutual friends
I confused the question: Are you looking for the overlap in friends or a mutual friendship between two people? Dumping friend IDs and looking for duplicates is the right way to do the former. TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: Location ...
On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 9:15 PM, Scott C. Lemon scottcle...@gmail.com wrote: What is the current maximum size of the location field? I've looked around and have not yet found a doc that tells me what to expect. I want to ensure that I am caching the entire location string ... I'd like to know that too. The Location field seems to get truncated after a certain number of characters, but not immediately. I've put in a long Location and had it work for awhile and then suddenly I notice that it's been shortened. I'm not sure if this is due to some app that I'm using which is truncating it or if Twitter does. If it is Twitter it seems strange that it works for awhile. FWIW TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: Entity encoding in API is broken.
On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Jonathan Feinberg e.e.c...@gmail.com wrote: In other words, either encode the whole tweet, or none of it, when providing tweets as data. And, in case anyone is voting, I really really wish that and didn't count as 4 characters. It seems odd that it does when and are encoded but only count as one. Related: There's no real need to encode the is there? TjL
[twitter-dev] Are and no longer counted as 4 characters?
I learned long ago that and counts as 4 characters because it gets encoded as HTML. I just did a test (thanks to Chad for suggesting it) and it appears that this is no longer the case, but I was wondering if this was: a) a mistake on my part and it had never been true b) had changed recently c) is something else TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: one-click follow
On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Pete Warden searchbrow...@gmail.com wrote: From a UI point of view I'd prefer to have a dedicated Twitter landing page that you could send people to that just contained a 'Do you want to follow X?' rather than having the ubiquitous 'Go to this page and then find the follow button' text on every source page. Just my 2 cents though. :) That's exactly how blocking works. http://twitter.com/blocks/confirm/NAME shows what blocking means and asks if you want to do it. I'd love to see something like: http://twitter.com/follow/confirm/NAME which would explain following and notifications (and give them a chance to turn notifications on/off right there if they have a device defined).
[twitter-dev] Does this exist?
My favorite part of TwitReports is the Follower Crossover information: Assume a user Joe and a user Ed. Ed follows Joe. Joe might want to know 1) Does anyone I follow also Ed? 2) Who else does Ed follow that I also follow? 3) Who is following both of us? is there a web site out there which shows this information already if I put in two Twitter names? Don't want to reinvent the wheel :-) TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: one-click follow
On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Nicole Simon nee...@gmail.com wrote: following on the other hand is at the core of twitter and comes right after tweeting - it is nothing where the user really has to think about oh how do I do this but rather leading to the part where they make their usual decision if or if not to follow somebody. You're assuming that the only way that anyone gets to Twitter is via Twitter. What if I want a link on my blog which says Follow me on Twitter? Click the link, see the text (read it if you need to), say Yup, I want to follow this person on Twitter. What if you get a TwitReport ( http://tr.im/twitreport ) for a new follower and think Yeah, this is someone I'd like to follow? What would you rather do, load their entire profile page just to click the Follow link, or just load the part that you need? Now assume you're on your iPhone or Blackberry. Which would you rather do? There's no 'Follow' mechanism for the mobile Twitter. BTW, a TwitReport gives you the block URL. But I can't give a follow URL. I'd love to see something like: http://twitter.com/follow/confirm/NAME which would explain following and notifications (and give them a chance to turn notifications on/off right there if they have a device defined). in this case I would have to go to the real profil to make my decision and then click on follow - 3 steps instead of 2, there is not really an advantage. Only if your imagination is limited to the idea that no one ever comes to Twitter except from Twitter. No one is suggesting taking away the follow link as it exists. But it has limitations. TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: auto follow using twitter api
Well, you can't auto-follow when someone sends you a DM, because you have to ALREADY be following someone in order to get a DM. You can auto-follow when someone starts to follow you. If you are familiar with procmail, you can auto-follow using the recipe below. (If you are not familiar with procmail, please delete and ignore. It's beyond my scope to teach and not every mail server supports it.) :0ci * ^X-Twitteremailtype: is_following * ^From: @postmaster\.twitter\.com * ^Subject: .* is now following you on Twitter! * ^X-Twittersenderscreenname: \/[^ ]+ | curl--netrc -s \ --data POST \ http://twitter.com/friendships/create/$MATCH.xml; /dev/null Note that you MUST have your twitter credentials stored in ~/.netrc for this to work in a format like this: machine twitter.com login YourTwitternameHere password SeKrEt Also note that this doesn't do any error-checking to make sure that the auto-follow has worked. FWIW TjL
[twitter-dev] Enable/Disable DM Notifications via API?
I've looked through http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation and I can see how to enable/disable notifcations on a per-person basis, but nothing which is the equivalent of sending an SMS saying off (to disable all notifications except DMs) or a 2nd off (to disable even DM notifications) or like the options found at http://twitter.com/devices Are these functions not available through the API or am I just missing them? TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: Enable/Disable DM Notifications via API?
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Alex Payne a...@twitter.com wrote: Call http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#updatedeliverydevice with device=none. 1) FYI I called it like so: curl -s --netrc -d POST 'http://twitter.com/account/update_delivery_device.xml?device=sms' to enable notifications, and there's nothing in the response that says You have no SMS device defined, so we can't really enable updates to it. 2) I called it again (on an account which does have a device enabled) and it returned the basic information, but did not change the setting (which I checked by loading http://twitter.com/devices in my browser). I turned it on/off at the commandline, no change on the web. (I couldn't find a way to check the current device state [off/sms/im] via the API either.) TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: Enable/Disable DM Notifications via API?
One last thing (I think) The /devices page gives the option to get ONLY 'DM's sent as device updates, but I don't see how to do that in the API either. TjL
[twitter-dev] notifications info via the API seems broken
OK, I just added a device to my @twitreport account and added exactly ONE person to get notifications from (@Moltz) Then I did this to dump my 'friends' list (note: my Twitter login information is in ~/.netrc) curl --netrc --silent http://twitter.com/friends/ids/twitreport.xml | egrep ^id | sed 's#id##g; s#/id##g' /tmp/follow that gives me a list of IDs of people that I follow, one per line, in a temp file /tmp/follow If I then go through that list and dump the show information, and grab only the notifications information: while read line do NOTIFICATION_STATUS=`curl -s --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show/$line.xml |\ egrep notifications.*/notifications |\ sed 's#.*notifications##g; s#/notifications##g'` echo $line: $NOTIFICATION_STATUS done /tmp/follow I am getting mostly all true responses (as if I was getting device notifications for all those people). If I go to the website (logged in as TwitReport) it shows that I am NOT getting any of those notifications. Is the API giving me bad information or am I asking the wrong question? TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: Are statuses deleted method
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Alex Payne a...@twitter.com wrote: For the moment, when we delete statuses, we really DELETE (in SQL terms) statuses! In the future we'll probably just hide them, as we do with deleted users whose accounts are still being held for possible user-triggered restoration. How is search.twitter.com able to find them if they are deleted? Are there two DBs of statuses? TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: notifications info via the API seems broken
Following up: XML seems to be returning wrong information, JSON is
returning correct information:
for users 'luomat' and 'brookr' who I am following but not getting updates for
$ curl -s --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show/luomat.json | tr ','
'\012' | awk -F: '/^notifications:/{print $2}'
false
$ curl -s --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show/luomat.xml | egrep
notifications.*/notifications | sed 's#.*notifications##g;
s#/notifications##g'
true
$ curl -s --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show/brookr.json | tr ','
'\012' | awk -F: '/^notifications:/{print $2}'
false
$ curl -s --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show/brookr.xml | egrep
notifications.*/notifications | sed 's#.*notifications##g;
s#/notifications##g'
true
XML is returning 'true' for almost every follower.
TjL
ps - FWIW,
curl -s --netrc -d POST
'http://twitter.com/account/update_delivery_device.json?device=none'
is not changing my device settings either.
[twitter-dev] Re: notifications info via the API seems broken
I don't think cacheing explains my bug. I have never had device
updates for these people; in fact I only just added a device this
afternoon and the default state is false.
TjL
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Matt Sanford m...@twitter.com wrote:
Hi there,
I believe both following and notifications are incorrectly returned due
to the same cacheing bug
(http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=157). I have been
working on this off and on for quite some time and hope to get it resolved
soon.
Thanks;
— Matt Sanford
On Feb 24, 2009, at 01:28 PM, TjL wrote:
Following up: XML seems to be returning wrong information, JSON is
returning correct information:
for users 'luomat' and 'brookr' who I am following but not getting updates
for
$ curl -s --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show/luomat.json | tr ','
'\012' | awk -F: '/^notifications:/{print $2}'
false
$ curl -s --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show/luomat.xml | egrep
notifications.*/notifications | sed 's#.*notifications##g;
s#/notifications##g'
true
$ curl -s --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show/brookr.json | tr ','
'\012' | awk -F: '/^notifications:/{print $2}'
false
$ curl -s --netrc http://twitter.com/users/show/brookr.xml | egrep
notifications.*/notifications | sed 's#.*notifications##g;
s#/notifications##g'
true
XML is returning 'true' for almost every follower.
TjL
ps - FWIW,
curl -s --netrc -d POST
'http://twitter.com/account/update_delivery_device.json?device=none'
is not changing my device settings either.
[twitter-dev] is there an Intro to Twitter API with PHP?
I know just enough PHP to be dangerous, but I'd like to start to play around with the API when designing web pages. Is there a for dummies or similar basic set of examples somewhere? I've never done API stuff (any API) via PHP. (for starters: I'd like to build myself a custom DM page which shows threaded (at least time-sorted) messages sent and received. I seem to always forget what I've been talking about with people and then they DM me and I have to go back and try to piece it together.) Thanks TjL
[twitter-dev] Re: About twitter Api
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Matt Sanford m...@twitter.com wrote: 1. Can i fetch twitter users 'friends' and 'followers' names and images, without authenticating the user or by passing only username? You can get a users friends and followers using the friends and followers methods (see the next answer), which do not require authentication. That's true, although if you are doing this from a shared server (i.e. a shell account at Dreamhost or similar) you may find yourself hitting API rate limits. I've done curl http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml which obviously had no authentication with it and seen the number at zero. I'm not sure if these limits are IP based or what. TjL
[twitter-dev] TwitReport and my Intro to Twitter on the commandline scripts
What is a TwitReport? Well, you know the new follower emails that you get? They aren't very useful, are they? I mean it's nice to know that you've got a new follower, but it doesn't tell you anything about them. So what do you do? You could click on the page and see if they are someone you want to follow but -- Oops, look, they have their updates protected. Or all they post is links to their website about how to profit from the new social media scene. Etc. Wouldn't it be nice to get a quick look at their 'stats'? How many followers / friends / posts they have? When did they join Twitter? On average, how often do they post? How many of those posts, on average, are @replies? Did they post anything for their Bio, Location, or Website? Can I see their last 20 updates so I can see if they seem interesting? 1) Who else do they follow who I follow? 2) Who else follows them who I follow? 3) Who else follows both me and this new person? If they look like a spammer, how about showing me the Block URL? For that matter, why not show me their Twitter avatar/icon/picture, I might not recognize their name, but I might recognize their picture. Well, that's what TwitReport tells you, all right in your email, so you can look them over at your leisure, even on the go (the emails are formatted to work well on an iPhone [including the picture] and should work on other mobile devices as well). (You can find out more including how to use it at http://tr.im/twitreport and/or follow @twitreport at http://twitter.com/twitreport ) That's the What. The How is all done on the commandline, using standard Unix tools: curl, sed, grep, etc. In fact I've amassed a little collection of scripts designed to answer the question How to do basic things on Twitter via the commandline. What to see everyone who follows you who you don't follow? What to see everyone who you follow who doesn't follow you? Want to balance your followers, that is, follow everyone who is following you and unfollow everyone who isn't? Want to be able to favorite the last update that someone posted just by using their name? [*] I coded up a bunch of these, including some with no real practical use (Want to fav the last 20 posts that someone made?), some that can be easily re-used (validate that a given input is a real twitter user, convert a Twitter ID to a Twitter Name), along with the script that powers twitreport, and put them all up here http://twitreport.tntluoma.com/ in the hopes that they might be of some use to someone FWIW TjL [*] why? two reasons: 1) Twitterrific pops up, I can cmd+tab to Terminal and fav it on the commandline. NO MOUSE NEEDED. Also, 2) I can KNOW that it went through. My satellite connection is kinda flaky sometimes, so my script will read back the tweet that I fav'd to make sure that it was the right one and to confirm that it went through
