I've been building an app which allows the user to search through recent (i.e. 6-9 days worth) public tweets on Twitter using the Twitter Search API.
Currently, the site is entirely public - that is, users do not need to sign in to Twitter (or even be Twitter users at all) to use my app.
However, the upcoming changes to the Twitter API have left me confused, particularly the fact it would appear that every request to Twitter's API will need to be authenticated.
My limited understanding of how Twitter's API works is that I need to authenticate my app using OAUTH, which in turn means that, if I want to continue accessing the Twitter Search API, users will need to sign in to my site before they can use the functionality related to the Search API - hence, only Twitter users will be able to use that section of my app.
Am I understanding this correctly, or is the Twitter Search API exempt from the changes? If I authenticate my app, does this mean the rate at which users can search Twitter status updates through my app is increased (or any other advantages over having non-authenticated apps)? Note that I am currently implementing a caching feature to cache related searches.
Thanks!
The changes to the Twitter API would affect your application depending on how your application works. These are the changes that you should be aware of:
All requests used to be anonymous. Now, all requests must be authenticated via OAuth.
With the old rate limits, according to my tests, you where able to make about one request per second per IP address. Now you can make 180 requests per 15 minute block per authenticated user (1 request every 5 seconds on average).
Not related, but still worth mentioning, the data that the new API returns is more similar to the data that the Streaming API returns. It's much more complete.
So, according to these changes, if your application uses some kind of a bot which polls the Search API, stores the results into a database, and then your users search within these stored results; you will have to implement OAuth with your own access token, which you can get by creating an application at dev.twitter.com.
But, if your application connects to the Search API every time that your users interact with it, and you think that you will have to make more than one request every 5 seconds on average, then you will have to ask your users to authenticate in order to get their access tokens for your requests.
Related
I'm developing of a community website that features about 500 user profiles. We now want to add the option to show the users' Instagram feed on their profile (with their consent). Going through the instagram API documentation some questions arose concerning the right approach about permissions and the review process.
Can anyone clarify if the following is a working approach and a valid use case regarding instagram's policy: Creating one client ID / access token for the website that is used to communicate serverside with the Instagram API, using the public_content permission to query the members' timeline. Server side caching would ensure that the rate limits are respected.
Since we need read-only access to public content only we would like to avoid managing authorization of every single member.
Thanks!
In the recent API changes Instagram removed the ability to use the client_id for requests and now an access_toek obtained by authorising and Instagram account is required for everything
You could make an account for your website, authorize it and use its access_token, but it will need to apply for the public_content permission and I don't thin Instagram will like this use case. Also with 500 accounts you may hit your Ali request limit.
The better option is to require uses to authorise their Instagram account if they want their recent posts on their profile and use their token to get their recent posts. This way you don't need the public_content permission
Apologies if this question has already been asked.
I have followed this guide to create a script that will bulk delete members from a specified Yammer group and I have this working perfectly.
The process used at the minute is obtaining a token for a user, then using that token to remove the user from the group, which takes two API calls.
My question is about "sleeping" to avoid tripping the rate limiter. On the documentation for the Yammer API rate limits (link) it states that "rate limits are per user per app".
In another stackoverflow question (link) it's mentioned that in this context, the user refers to the user token.
Since in my script, I'm only using a single API call per user token (to remove the user from the group), is it necessary implement a sleep to avoid tripping the limit?
I'm also wondering whether the API call to retrieve the token for a user may possibly trip the limiter since it's called using the admin token?
I've run a few tests removing 52 users from a group using a script without any "sleeps" and it completed successfully in around 27 seconds, just trying to understand why this didn't break the limiter.
Thanks in advance!
is it necessary implement a sleep to avoid tripping the limit?
Yes, the admin user (or token if you like) could trip the limit in this case. To be on the safe side, that is, to avoid your app from being (manually or automatically) blocked, you shouldn't make more than request per second to Yammer endpoints that are categorised under "Other Resources". That's the Official guideline.
Well, pretty much what it says on the tin.
I'm really curious about how pages like Statigram do their search functionality without users authentication and not exceeding the limits?
If I'm correct, Instagram API allows 5000 calls per hour, so I believe it's very likely that they indeed have more traffic than 5000 requests per hour.
Maybe It's a dumb question and Statigram has a special deal with Instagram to use their API or maybe they don't use the API and they use some other method?
The only special request you have to send to Instagram is the request to post comments.
The API limit is 5000 requests per hour per access_token or client_id. Every user has their own access_token, so as long as the requests from the third party application uses each individual access token, they will be hard pressed to exceed 5000 per user per hour.
That works out to 83 requests per minute and any user interacting with your application is highly unlikely to hit that.
From the docs:
You are limited to 5000 requests per hour per access_token or client_id overall. Practically, this means you should (when possible) authenticate users so that limits are well outside the reach of a given user.
If you are not using user authentication, you will likely hit the limit with just your client_id.
Most likely they're using one of the following methods:
An arrangement with Instagram
Credential rotation
IP rotation
Heavy caching (especially across credentials or IPs)
Screenscraping
In cases like this, if you don't have a special arrangement, you're almost certainly violating the terms of service. If you think your service is useful enough that Instagram would be willing to whitelist you to make more requests, get in touch with them.
They must have some sort of arrangement with Instagram as #RunscopeAPITools mentions. You are able to post comments to Instagram from Statigram, which requires special permission.
I am new to linkedin api. I have a doubt regarding the api.
I am integrating the api in my application, so different user have to register in the linkedin to get the data using that api? Can it be pre registered and the user can get the data whatever he wants.
Suppose user wants to search about company. He will type the company name and will get the names of the company related to search. He should not log in in linked in before searching.
Is it possible?
If you are using the JavaScript API, then yes, you may need to have the user log in each time as the JavaScript API's authorization is cleared every time the user closes their browser.
If you are using the REST API, you can store the user's OAuth token and use that to make the calls on behalf of the user, saving them having to sign-in each time.
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.