Friendfeed consumes the Twitter Streaming API to update Twitter status. SUP is not employed.
All Twitter accounts have access to the Streaming API, documented here: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation -John Kalucki http://twitter.com/jkalucki Services, Twitter Inc. On Sep 7, 5:08 am, Sam Street <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > herehttp://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
