I want to know how many followers my followers have (so it's recursively).
The Problem is obviously the API limit.
I read out my follower ids with http://api.twitter.com/1/followers/ids.json?screen_name=username
I request http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?user_id=the_id, but if I got many followers, I quickly get blocked by API limitations.
Is there a way to bypass this? For example, would this work for Twitter users with more than 6000 (or even infinite?) followers, if I ask to authenticate with their twitter account? Or is there another API call which may perform more requests?
If you use statuses/followers for your self, and page thru the results.
http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/statuses/followers
http://twitapi.com/explore/statuses-followers/
This will give you information on 100 followers per api call. In that result amongst other things is each followers, follower and following count.
6000 will only take 60 calls.
As this needs to be processed while authenticated you will also get 300 api calls per user.
Good luck.
There is currently no way to combine multiple API calls to Twitter into one, like Facebook allows you to.
So there probably is no way to do this efficiently, you just have to spread out the calls over multiple hours.
Related
I know you must be thinking that its impossible or its been asked already.
But I have 2 queries. The first is that by using Twitter API, using an access token of my own profile, can I get all (more than 100) the retweets of my own tweet? Not someone else's, as all previous questions at stackoverflow have been asked.
Because there's a difference in private and public tweet and getting data related to it.
Secondly, if we cannot get more than 100 retweets, then how does this app Pickaw (formerly Twrench) https://pickaw.com/en gets all the retweets even if they're more than 500 and the corresponding data?
Any ideas?
The Twitter API only provides access to up to 100 Retweeters (IDs for users that RT'd a Tweet), regardless of whether this is your owned Tweet, or another one.
As for a specific app, it is only possible to speculate, unless the source code was Open Source and available. I would suggest there are two ways to get all the Retweets:
pay for premium or enterprise search access, and use the advanced PowerTrack rules to find Retweets of a specific Tweet ID;
use the Account Activity API webhooks to track whenever a user's Tweet is Retweeted. Not that this would only work in a real-time tracking case; you wouldn't be able to check historical Tweets.
Twitter API has the GET method that return specific user tweets,
I want to create stream by specific user, but in Twitter Stream API there no method that can help me.
GET Sites in Beta now, I haven't got access to it
Any Idea how to create live update/stream with specific twitter user ?
You have 2 solutions. If you are able to get the credentials from the user (user accepting your app), then you can use the UserStream.
If you do not have access to this, you will have to use the FilterStream.
This one is a bit more restrictive as you cannot run more than 2 FilteredStream from the same ip or with the same credentials. In addition to this, a FilteredStream is limited to 5000 users as described on the twitter doc.
The default access level allows up to 400 track keywords, 5,000 follow userids and 25 0.1-360 degree location boxes.
I believe the solution to this problem is to use follow IDs within your stream and then check that the tweet->user->id for each tweet is within the list of follow IDs. That way you know that the post is original and not being retweeted etc. It does seem bizarre that twitter doesn't allow you to filter only messages "from".
I also believe that retweets have an 'retweeted_status' element in the result which if absent also shows its a new tweet from your following User IDs.
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.
How do I access the number of followers a user has on Twitter for 10,000 usernames or more each day?
Needless to say this hits the rate limit. I was told there are creative ways to avoid the limit, but I can't find any. I also don't want to use or can't use authentication of users. I need to do it as an anonymous server.
Give GET users/lookup a try. It lets you get user objects for 100 users in a single request. 10000 users / 100 user/request = 100 requests which will be easy to do in an hour let alone all day.
I'm working on an app that allows users to search for a particular friend on Twitter (and eventually Facebook) and then send them a message (sort of).
My problem is, the API limits me to only getting 100 friends per request. For a user with a lot of friends, this could take many requests (even if I cache it) and will make my app hit the rate limit pretty quickly.
Is there an official (or unofficial) Twitter API for searching for only your friends?
The solution I have implemented for now is this: whenever a user logs in, iterate through each 100 block of friends and put them in the Rails.cache. They stay there until the user logs out and logs back in. Now that I know that the API requests are counted against the logged in user, I shouldn't need to worry about hitting the rate limit API since each user will have 350 requests per hour.
However, I have found a few problems with this, and I have a few thoughts on solutions:
Problem: We are storing a large amount of data to cache someone's friends.
Solution: It would be best if we could cache all twitter users who are friends of one of our users in one object (or hash) and also cache only the IDs of the friends for each user (which can be grabbed with far less API calls). This would create a bit of a slowdown, but would be far less storage required. Then, whenever a user logs in, we would simply update the global friend cache with any changes (i.e. picture, name, etc.).
Problem: My application still has to store this and figure out how to parse it; it's not very organized.
Solution: Extract this functionality into a new application that creates a better API for searching. If I accomplish this, I'll post an update here with a link.