Hi, I'm in the process of trying to integrate Twitter into a web app I'm building. The application is a Ruby on Rails app (my first). I've reviewed some of the Twitter API docs and have a general idea of what options are available and wanted to ask some questions to clarify some fuzzy areas. First, let me explain what I'd like to accomplish.
Users of my app will be able to indicate that they want any of their tweets with hashtags to appear on my site as messages posted from that user. So, if I were a user who had selected this option and tweeted "I like #foo", this site would see that tweet and add the same message to their site. This is essentially so that people don't have to actually directly use my app to use it. Instead, they just tweet stuff and my app picks it up (so long as it has a hash tag). Secondary to that, a nice-to-have feature would be to know when a twitter user follows or unfollows another twitter user. I'd like my app to see if the followed or unfollowed user is using my service as well and to automatically follow or unfollow them in my app. My question is, which of the APIs should I use? I see that there are three streaming APIs: - Streaming API. I think this is basically a way I could have my app connect to twitter and listen for tweets from users of my service. I know you can filter the stream, for example to my web apps' users. However, what if I have a *lot* of twitter users I want to filter to? Like tens or hundreds of thousands of users? I don't have this problem now (and may never) but I'd like to know if this is still what I should be looking at. If there are lots of twitter users I'm listening for tweets from should I still have only one stream connection open or multiple? What is a general best practice for this? Also, I get the impression that the streaming API is essentially a stream of the same public information that's available to any twitter user. Given that, I'm unsure if this API includes follow and unfollow information. It seems like this may be the easiest of the APIs to implement. - User Stream I'm pretty sure this is intended for desktop clients like TweetDeck. It's a one-user per connection stream. I'm pretty sure Twitter doesn't want me potentially making tens or hundreds of thousands of individual connections to their stream. So, I'm pretty sure this is out. - Site Stream This appears to be very similar to User Stream, but, as the docs say, it allows you multiplex several user streams over one streaming connection. This may be another option I want to consider. I know that it will let me see multiple twitter user's tweets on one connection. I think it will let me get notices of follows and unfollows (meeting my second nice-to-have feature needs). The thing is, I'm unclear on if I would use one connection for ALL of my users or multiple connections, pooling several (I don't know how many) users into each. I saw in the docs details about how some connections should be merged, etc, over time given certain conditions. That's a bit beyond where I am at the moment. Also, I see that this is a private beta you can apply to join. They also say to implement User Stream before applying. That's all fine and dandy, I'm happy to do both. But, at the same time, User Streams is a one-user-per-connection arrangement, right? It doesn't match my use case and seems, well, like the wrong thing to do. Can anyone offer any guidance on this? - One other idea I had. What if I simply setup a twitter account for my app? I could then use the standard twitter API to have this account follow and unfollow twitter users based on their preferences in my app. And, perhaps, from there I could somehow (via user stream?) feed posts from those users my app is following into my app. I'm a bit concerned that this may simply be a hack and maybe even violate twitter's TOC. So, overall, I'm just looking for a bit of guidance out of the gate on where to start research and work. Also, if you know of any quality Ruby gems that implement the approach you suggest, I'd love to hear about them. Thanks for your help, Doug Hughes -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: https://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: https://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: https://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/twitter-development-talk
