I would love it if Twitter would develop an equivalent to Facebook's
FQL, Yahoo's YQL, Amazon's SimpleDB, or Google's GQL (used for app
engine data storage).
Basically an abstracted SQL-like query engine for doing queries and
getting back data the data you want using virtual tables of different
data twitter serves up.
You could do something basic like:
SELECT StatusID, UserID, Text FROM StatusUpdates as S
WHERE
S.UserID in (SELECT UserID FROM SocialGraph WHERE FollowerUseringID
= MYUSERID) and
S.StatusID > LASTID
ORDER BY S.StatusID DESC
LIMIT 200
to get a basic user's following timeline or whatever. From there you
can build on from that and get a bit more complex.
It could even build on from just query syntax to modify and destructive calls.
Maybe something like:
DELETE FROM StatusUpdates WHERE StatusID = 200102;
or:
INSERT INTO StatusUpdates(text,replyToStatusID,replyToUserID) VALUES
('@johnsmith hello',123601020,235133);
or:
UPDATE StatusUpdates SET favorite = TRUE WHERE StatusID = 123601020;
You could do it where you do an HTTP get/post with a query like above
to twitter's rest api, and the results could come back as JSON or XML
or whatever.
Some concepts like this could be done in a local side wrapper (like
I've seen a SQL bridge for MSSQL for twitter on here a while back) but
it would be awesome if these were processed twitter server side. If
done right, it can save on overhead on both twitter and from the
client side.
Like in one case I have where I'm hitting the following timeline, I'm
missing something out of the user structure that you get back from
that, so I turn around and do another user call on user for each tweet
to get that data. Half the data I get back in both cases don't use on
both calls but it would be awesome to be able to get that data in one
call.
A lot to consider around optimization and limits and a bit of work to
build it but I think something like that would be really useful.
Zac
