I want to access a list of who liked a certain sound. I know that with users, you can go to their /followers JSON and retrieve info on the user's followers, 50 users at a time. Is there a way to do that with likes on a single sound?
I am working on PHP application, which communicates with Google Plus. For getting information about people in circles I send request to this link: https://plus.google.com/u/0/_/socialgraph/lookup/visible?o=%5Bnull,null,%22GOOGLE_USER_ID%22%5D&rt=j and it retrieves me list of people in circles for specific user.
In my application I want to check for each user in my friend list (person in circle), if he/she has me also in circles, which means we are friends. But if person has blocked to list people in circles for public, then I get empty array in response despite he/she is my friend. So I would like to know, how to send with this link authorized request. For example how to include there access token.
Because now it shows only public data and it acts like I am not logged in.
Use: https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/people/list and ask the user to sign-in then you'll be able to get their consent and retrieve the list of people they're following.
What are the informations from a user that are avaible, by default, for users that are not his "friend"s ?
Can i have the list of "checkins" from any Foursquare user only by making API requests ?
What kind of information about a user i can fetch, without having him as my friend (friend of the account used to perform the API requests) on foursquare ?
On linkedin, for example, i could fetch his Company, but if the user used to perform the API requests had this user as a friend, i could fetch the whole "company history" . Is there any restriction like this one on foursquare ?
Thanks in advance
You can try this out yourself at the API Explorer to see: https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/explore#req=users/1234
As you can see, even if you're not friends with this user, you can see their name, friends' names, contact info (Twitter/Facebook), and checkin counts, but not the actual checkins themselves. You will need to be friends with this user to see their checkin history.
Note that if you make this request without authentication (e.g., https://api.foursquare.com/v2/users/1234 with no oauth_token ) then you can't see any information about them.
Assume there's a mobile app and a server.
I have question about rate limiting and hoping someone can give some advice on a design as I'm banging my head on how to navigate around rate limit. There must be something I"m missing because the 150 unauthenticated rate limit per IP per hour is extremely low.
Imagine the scenario I want to build is the following (simplified into a trivial example for this discusion). Assume user is signed into Twitter for this entire discussion to remove discussion about oAuth.
Mobile talks to our service to show users twitter friends list. Every time the mobile app is loaded, it will show the entire friends list, and highlighting the new friends that were added within the last 2 days.
That's it. But the trick is that I want to ensure that the friends list is always up to date in the client, which means our server has to have the most recent up to date friends list.
Periodically, I want my server to automatically scan the Twitter friends list for every user of my app to see if new friends have been added.
Our initial design was getting our server to do all the work with this flow:
New User signs in on client, gives access token to server
Server makes call to Twitter REST APIs to get initial friends lists
Server stores the Twitter Friends IDs and shows responds to the client with that list.
Periodically (e.g. every 48 hours), server checks Twitter REST APIs for friends list for each user and compares it to our cached Twitter friends list we have for them to see who is new and to highlight in the mobile app.
The good thing about this is that all the interaction with twitter to get friends list, compare and peridiocally refresh is on the server. Mobile client just makes a single call to my server and gets friends list.
The problem with this design is that it will work for a single user, but since the rate limit is 150 per hour on un-authenticated calls, I will hit my limit as soon as 151 users user my service (which has a fixed IP).
The only solution I can see is to have the client do the work for each user, then send me the friends list which my server caches. This takes care of Step #2 above. However, for Step #4, I'd have to build something into the client to auto refresh twitter friends and send back to the server.
This is super clumsy to have the client involved at all in this Twitter friends list operation.
At first I thought I was crazy and the public unauthenticated APIs like getting friends lists wouldn't be subject to rate limiting. However, according to their docs, it is.
Am I missing something obvious or is the only way to solve this is to put heavy logic into the client?
With whitelisting gone for those that aren't grandfathered or Twitter business partners, I don't think you have any alternative but to have your mobile app do the Twitter API calls from the handset.
Having the handset call Twitter isn't a bad thing by any means. Pretty much every Twitter client in the world does it. One benefit will be that the user will be authenticated to Twitter, and thus her full 350 calls per hour will be available to you. Keep in mind, however, that you should minimize your calls since the user may have other Twitter-aware applications installed on her handset eating into your call allotment, and vice versa.
Now to the solution. The way I would implement your use case would be to first fetch the complete list of friends for your user by calling the friends/ids method.
http://api.twitter.com/1/friends/ids.json?screen_name=yourUsersName
The above call will return the most recent 5,000 friend IDs, in order followed, for #yourUsersName. If you want to fetch more friend IDs than the first 5,000, you'll need to specify the cursor parameter to initiate paging.
Next, I would check the latest list of friends we just fetched against the list on the handset, syncing them by removing any IDs that are no longer present, while adding any that are new.
If we only need the friend IDs, then we're done at a cost of one API call per 5,000 friend IDs. If, however, we need to get user info for these new friends as well, then I would call users/lookup and pass in the list of all new users that we discovered while syncing friend IDs. You can request up to 100 user objects at a time.
http://api.twitter.com/1/users/lookup.json?user_id=123123,5235235,456243,4534563
You user must be authenticated in order to make the above request, but the call can fetch any Twitter user profiles you wish -- not just those that are friends of the authenticated user.
So, let's say for example that a user has 2,500 friends and has never used your app before. In that case, she would burn one call to fetch all of the friend IDs, and 25 calls for her friends' information. That's not too bad to get the app populated with data.
Subsequent calls should be more streamlined with probably only two calls burned (one for the IDs, and one to get the new friends).
Finally, once the data has been updated on the handset, the deltas for the IDs and user data can be gathered up and pushed to your server.
It may even be possible that your server application won't even have to interface with Twitter at all, and that should alleviate the 150 user limit you are encountering.
Some final notes:
Be sure to note in your app's privacy policy that you sync your user's friend list with your server.
I recommend specifying JSON as the return format for all Twitter API calls. It is a much more lightweight document format than XML, and you will typically transfer only about 1/3 to 1/2 as much data over the wire.
Pick a Twitter framework appropriate for your mobile device and your programming language. Twitter access is a commodity these days, and there's little to no reason to reinvent how to access the Twitter API.
I answered a similar question about an approach for efficiently fetching followers here.
Since you are making request on behalf of users you should make those requests be authenticated as those users. Then requests will count against each users own pool of 350 requests/hour.
I want to create a simple Twitter application, but I have a problem. I want to show the user information about his followers, but this requires one API request to get a list of all user IDs following him, and then many additional API requests to get the user information corresponding to the user IDs that were just fetched. Is it possible to get user info for many followers in one request?
Use the Followers method:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/followers.xml (Twitter API Documenation)
It returns detailed information about each follower.