Hi Ryan,
I'm not sure if we could support this sort of whitelisting/ blacklisting on our side but I'll keep it in mind when working on the new API. In the mean time perhaps you can use a larger count parameter on the friends_timeline method. Rather than 20 you can use count=100 and it should minimize your problem.
Thanks; — Matt Sanford / @mzsanford On Jan 12, 2009, at 11:36 AM, TweetByMail wrote:
Working on my filters at TweetByMail (sending twitter updates via email... basically a SMS service replacement/stand-in). I have a filter set up on my end that can either whitelist or blacklist a set of friend usernames. A person may want to read all the updates on the web, but only want a select few emailed to them. The potential problem is that I am filtering AFTER retrieving the (maximum of) 20 most recent updates. If your whitelist is a small percentage of your total friends, all 20 updates might get filtered out and you'll miss updates that you actually want on your whitelist. If the friends_timeline request could be submitted by POST, you could add two parameters: filtertype - Either 'whitelist' or 'blacklist' filterusers - A list of usernames to be filtered The alternative solution (which I'm not planning/wanting to do) would required more traffic through the API... either more frequent friends_timeline requests, or even worse... individually requesting updates for each whitelisted username. Just a feature I would selfishly enjoy... but I can see it coming in handy for other people, too. Thanks for all your efforts, Alex. It's been nice and easy developing with the Twitter API! -Ryan
