Hi,
The problem is: how to find tweets that point to a certain URL. Most
of those tweets would use a shortened version of the URL, and most of
them probably bit.ly. Bit.ly does not provide a way to list all
shortened versions of a URL, and creates individually shortened
versions of each URL per User (namely, the twitter user, so there is
no way to find the URL that is created via Twitter status updates -
which would probably be the most common URL).
I thought I had found a way to at least approximate searching for
bit.ly-masked references on twitter with the /stats method from bitly.
Giving a bitly hash, the /stats method lists referrers by urls, which
might look like this (part of a /stats response):
"twitter.com": { "/": 1, "/testFollowAPI": 1 } }
So I figured that I could then take all the paths that are not common
Twitter paths (like /home, /, /replies, /favorites, /inbox) and assume
that they are twitter accounts.
Then I searched Twitter for tweets from these accounts containing
"bit.ly". For each hit, I would then again ask bit.ly to expand the
bit.ly url in the tweet. With any luck, I would find the tweet
referencing the url.
Apart from the fact that it is a pretty wasteful process (lots of
calls to bitly and also to Twitter search), I only just realized that
of course /stats only lists references when somebody has clicked on a
bit.ly URL. Since I don't expect many people to click on the URL on a
user's profile page, the utility of this approach is greatly
diminished. I think most of the referrers would just be /home if users
click on tweets in their stream.
I don't suppose Twitter would be willing to "click" on each incoming
bit.ly link with referrer from the tweeting user's page at least
once? ;-)
I gave the long story because I want to emphasize that as far as I
know, there still is no proper solution to this. Bit.ly does NOT
provide a way to list all shortened versions of an URL.
If there is such a method, please point me to it, because I just don't
see it.
I filed an issue for this a while ago, but it was closed with the
announcement that it would be solved sometime in the future.
Unfortunately there was not new "issue" or "feature" created that I
could track to see when it would be solved.
The original issue is here:
http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=402
Sorry for the long post - I just wasted so much time trying to work
around the issue, and only realized the flaws in the approach right
now...
Björn
