Hi all, I've recently been doing some research on how FriendFeed manages to push user's twitter updates to users FriendFeed profile so fast. I was very impressed at the speed these updates were delivered to FriendFeed and appears on my profile (within 5 seconds) so I started looking into how it works.
I've learnt quite a lot about SUP by Googling it: Lots of relevant links here http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/12/simple-update-protocol-update.html tl;dr FriendFeed faced problems updating their profiles because they were issuing millions of API calls to keep everyones profiles up to date. They came up with a proposal for SUP - a new kind of API that services provide that only lists accounts that have been updated recently. This saves FriendFeed requesting ALL users so frequently - they now only need to request the API for accounts that have new content. According to that blog post various services have already setup SUP feeds to help FriendFeed update things in close-to-real-time. My question is: Does Twitter have a SUP feed that can publicly be used? We are starting development on a site with similar real-time functionality to FriendFeed and currently face the same problem FriendFeed had (before they devised the SUP proposal and implementation). If Twitter does not provide a public SUP feed? can someone please try to explain how FriendFeed push user's twitter updates within seconds?? My only guess is that they may be constantly connected to the streaming API's firehose method and monitoring updates from twitter accounts that are also associated with FriendFeed profiles. Hoping someone can shed some light on this for me. Thank you! -Sam
