I am still hoping for an answer to the questions in this thread, but meanwhile here is another idea the Twitter Team might find interesting.
As it seems many of us want to track retweets. What we are really interested in is the number of retweets over time so we can find trending topics, in my case within a community (e.g. not for public timeline tweets, just for the tweets among my friends). So: why not have a method that is capable of returning several retweet counts? So what if statuses/retweets would either accept *just a single id* in which case the behaviour is as currently described, or *many ids* in which case the response is a summary for many statusIds. The summary should contain the usernames that retweeted the original ids and the retweet counts at least. If the API is left as it is, guess a lot of us will need to get whitelisted. Excessively calling status/retweets for single tweets cannot be the intention of Twitter. Also many retweet aggregators will really be in trouble (unless they use the streaming apis, but those again are alpha and some cannot use them for technical reasons) as the twitter accounts of their users are not whitelisted and as such constraint to 150 API calls. Come on, would anyone at least consider that or let us know best practices for tracking retweets after the api is launched? Cheers Sven On Sep 18, 4:37 pm, hansamann <[email protected]> wrote: > Excactly, my main point, too. > > The problem is I want to track how tweets 'develop' over time. This > means I would need to pull the status/retweets every minute or so for > every tweet I am tracking. There is a 150 api call limit currently... > without whitelisting I will be doomed. > > I was hoping that the 'retweeted to me' timeline would include a > 'count' field for eachretweet. I could then have checked that > timeline every minute (and pull the info for the last 50 retweets to > me let's say). This would just have consumed 1 request each minute for > example... not 1 request per tweet tracked per minute, which... could > be a lot. > > Any ideas? > > Otherwise: how can I get the app groovytweets whitelisted? > > Thanx > Sven > > On Sep 18, 3:21 pm, Nick Arnett <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Marcel Molina <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Asking developers to collapse retweets in timelines is onerous, > > > complicated and confusing. We're not going to do it that way. We are > > > going to add a resource that gives you all retweets for a given tweet. > > > In timelines you will get only the firstretweet. You can then request > > > all retweets for that tweet at any time to get up to 100 retweets that > > > have been created for it. > > > Will timelines show if additional retweets exist for each tweet? Otherwise, > > won't we have to make the request for every tweet to find out if there are > > others? > > > Nick
