If I'm not mistaken, that still requires you to page through 5000 at a time until you reach the end to figure out the number of followers. I don't need the user ids of each follower, just the count. Being able to get this with users/show is perfect because it only requires one API call. Except it doesn't update between status updates.
Will this be fixed? - Jason On Sep 4, 8:51 pm, freefall <tehgame...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Until today you could use:http://twitter.com/followers/ids.xml > > and get the total - this was way more accurate than getting it from > user/show. They appear to ahve just lowerd this total to 5000 so that > will no longer work (unless that's a bug). > > > On Sep 2, 5:44 pm, Jason Tan <jasonw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Hello, > > > > I have spent a good portion of today reading through closed, merged, > > > and open issues onhttp://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list > > > > I am trying to figure out the best way to get an accurate followers > > > count. Initially, I was using /users/show which returns the full user > > > object, including the followers_count item. However, I have noticed > > > that this number only updates when the user posts a tweet. If the > > > user has no new tweets, the follower count is not updated. Data I was > > > pulling in was many days old. I understand the need to cache data, > > > but being unable to pull up an approximate count of followers from the > > > past several days is a problem. > > > > I have seen this issue posted many times, but it is always merged into > > > issue 474, which appears to only deal with the following flag, and not > > > the followers_count. There was one issue (which I can't find anymore) > > > where there was acknowledgment that the users/show data was cached > > > until a new post was made but no mention of any fix or solution. > > > > My next approach was to use the statuses/user_timeline. I wasn't sure > > > if the user object for each status would have the "current" value or > > > the value at the time of the status update. When I grabbed the xml > > > formatted response, I got (starting from the most recent status and > > > going back): > > > 1686, 1653, 1685, 1685, 1685, 1685, 1685... > > > > Through the rest of the statuses, it stayed the same. Interestingly, > > > 1686 is the current value listed on the website. 1653 was the value I > > > got from /users/show. And I'm quite certain that the followers count > > > did not stay constant at 1685. > > > > Moreover, when I grabbed the json version of statuses/user_timeline, I > > > got entirely different results: > > > 1653, 1653, 1683, 1675, 1652, 1661, 1644... > > > > This seems to reflect the current number of followers at the time of > > > the status update, unlike the XML feed. > > > > Anyways, to get back to my original question. How do I get an > > > accurate followers count for a user? Also, why are there still XML/ > > > JSON discrepancies (I came across a few reported issues that said they > > > had been resolved). > > > > Any help or suggestions would be very much appreciated! > > > > Thanks, > > > Jason > > > > P.S. The account I was using for the above examples was DailyPHP
