I'm sure Taylor or Matt will reply politely to this rant. I don't work for Twitter, so I'd like to take on your attitude of entitlement directly towards this free service. Your basic approach can be summed up as "How dare Twitter have problems in a totally free API that I can use to build a business on!" First of all, this service is free, second there is an easy workaround for this. - You collect the tweets from the search API and store the user name, which is delivered correctly, along with the tweet info. You also get the avatar image. So you have enough now to display the tweet. - You then run a background process which waits until you have 100 user names, and requests their correct user info from the REST API. This can be stored in a separate user table. - This same process goes back to the tweets and updates each one with the correct user id. - You now have a valid relational database with a table for tweets, and a table for users.
While this isn't perfect, it isn't hard to do either. At 100 users per request, and as long as you only request data for users you haven't seen before, there is no problem back filling this user data within the rate limits. Now, back to your attitude. The Twitter API is free. I agree that they should fix search, but it is acquired code, and my bet is that they want to rewrite it rather than patch it. The real point is that it is free. It is not a right granted to you to always have perfect code delivered to you. Twitter benefits from you writing code against there API, and you benefit from getting the data for free. Be grateful. Chill. On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Corey Ballou <[email protected]> wrote: > I just wanted to bring group-wide awareness to the fact that search > results from Twitter do not return an actual user_id. This has been a > known defect (and yes, I do believe it's a *very large* defect) going > on over 2 years now. > > This is a call to arms to get this shit fixed. I can't believe it's > marked as an "enhancement". There's nobody else to blame for providing > a return param of "from_user" that doesn't actually map to an actual > user. For those of us storing relational data, you're costing > precious API calls for those users who are still utilizing the search > API. The streaming API is not sufficient for all use cases, so that's > not a valid answer. > > Below is the direct link to the issue tracker. > > https://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=214 > > -- > Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc > API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi > Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list > Change your membership to this group: > http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk > -- Adam Green Twitter API Consultant and Trainer http://140dev.com @140dev -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
