Let's say user A follows user B, and B follows A. I want to know the exact date A started following B and viceversa.
Is this information stored on twitter? Can I retrieve it using the API?
To clear out: The point of this question is finding a way to know who followed who first.
(I'm assuming both A and B deleted the notification e-mails)
No Ignacio, you can't. You just can know who follows who but not the date the follow started.
Looking at the API, there's is no way, there are two calls to get the followers:
User Methods/statuses/followers
and
Social Graph Methods/followers/ids
Neither of them returns dates or even a serial that would let you see who started following first. Really, there's no indication that twitter is internally storing this information, neither in the API nor Twitter's web interface.
This is a very old question, but perhaps some might be interested to know that while you cannot get the date at which someone started following, you can at least infer an "earliest possible following date" from the fact that the list of followers is ordered according to date, and the fact that follower objects come with a created_at timestamp.
Here's a Python function for calculating an "earliest possible following date": https://github.com/BernhardClemm/twitter-follow-dates
Of course Twitter stores it, because Twitter sorts followers and following lists by the date ;)
It is possible to do this, but impractical. When you call the followers API you can page the results. Each returned object contains next_cursor and prev_cursor items. These refer to the first and last records in the next and previous pages. These values are time based and can be used to calculate the time that the respective users followed you.
It follows that, if you set the page size to 1, you can walk through the list of follower IDs one at a time and the next_cursor value will allow you to derive the follow time for the next record.
This is reasonably simple to implement, however, in practice, you'll very quickly hit Twitter's API rate limit.
Related
I'm using the twitter API and would like to get all tweets from a given time period where a given user was mentioned.
I tried the search API with the until parameter where I could get the tweets for the previous 7 days from the date which is not the best, but fine. However, in this case the API only returns the number of tweets without the details.
Any ideas how to do it or what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks!
Strange, https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/search/tweets says it should return tweet objects. Are you sure you implemented it correctly? Which library are you using? Maybe there is a fault in its implementation. Another library could therefore be the solution.
Don't know whether this satisfies your needs, but you could also try to use the GET statuses/mentions_timeline API . This API returns up to 800 tweets in which the user was mentioned.
EDIT, based on the comments on this post:
You are doing 2 things wrong, namely:
As stated in the documentation the until parameter has a 7 day limit. So you can only retrieve up to 7 days of tweets.
Furthermore, you are making incorrect use of the since parameter. The since parameter specifies since this tweet (so the id of the tweet), not since this date.
Please read the documentation carefully. It is written very precisely and contains all the answers you probably need.
Right, this is really working on my nerves, but Instagram has to do something about their bloody documentation.
I am already trying for a week to live update my website with new instagram posts without refreshing the page. Twitter was fairly easy, but instagram is just one big mess. Basically I use the realtime Instagram API, the callback and all that stuff is working fine, but thanks to Instagram it does not return me an ID from the post that is new, the callback only returns some basic stuff:
[{"changed_aspect": "media", "object": "tag", "object_id": "nofilter", "time": 1391091743, "subscription_id": xxxxx, "data": {}}]
with this data you are nothing, except for the Tag, but I knew the tag before this callback too so doesn't matter. It actually only tells me that there is a new post. I have tried doing the same request as when the page loads, when this callback occurs, and get the posts that are newer than those already on the page. Unfortunately I have not succeeded in this yet. I have picked the ID from the last posted instagram post, and checked if it is in the callback request, and it's not.
What am I doing wrong?
I'd appreciate some help, thanks!
Edit:
I'd like to note that this is not only a problem with the realtime api, but also with the normal API. I just don't know how to compare data so I don't get duplicates in my database(normal api), or on my website (realtime). I can't find any tutorial or documentation (Yes, I might be blind), that explains to me how to compare data. I can only find the min_id and max_id, but no explanation what these id's contains. I checked these id's with id's from results, and they do not match. It's not an ID from a media item.
I also checked the next_url, and in my logic thinking, this should be a URL to the next page (like Twitter).
Am I looking at this all wrong?
Ok strike my old answer, I changed the way I do this. Here's how I'll do it now.
I still wait for 10 hits on my Real-time subscription, when I reach 10 I send off a new thread (if one is not already running).
The sync thread queries my DB for a value, I need the last min_tag_id I used. Then I query:
https://api.instagram.com/v1/tags/*/media/recent?access_token=*&min_tag_id=*
Try it out here: https://api.instagram.com/v1/tags/montreal/media/recent?access_token=*
You'll get 20 results, and a min_tag_id value. Append that to your url, you'll see you get no results. Wait a couple of seconds and refresh. Eventually you'll get some media, and a new min_tag_id.
(You can ignore the "next_url" value they give you, you won't be using that).
Basically you only need to store that min_tag_id and query until you have no more results, that means you're done then.
When you get a subscription push, you need to query that endpoint (tag / recent).
I normally start an synchronous thread to perform this so I can answer in under 2 seconds to Instagram.
Then you parse that endpoint and look for a "next url" value.
Keep querying that end point, parsing the media and going to the next url until you find your stop condition.
For me I try to match 10 consecutive records in my DB. Basically from the tag, I store media when then meet my business rules.
The Instagram documentation is accurate and actually well written.
The realtime API is working correctly. As stated in the documentation:
The changed data is not included in the payload, so it is up to you
how you'd like to fetch the new data. For example, you may decide only
to fetch new data for specific users, or after a certain number of
photos have been posted.
http://instagram.com/developer/realtime/
You only receive a notification that an update has happened to your subscribed object. It is up to you to call the API to find out what that data is.
You can call the /tags/[tag-name]/media/recent with an access token that you have previously stored on your own server or DB. Then, you should be able to compare the data returned from that endpoint with any data you have retrieved prior, and just pull the objects that you do not yet have.
We are trying to analyze the twitter Topsy API for twitter searches for our application.
the results are returning back 3 dates which are:
a.) 'trackback_date'
b.) 'target_birth_date'
c.) 'firstpost_date'
i need to extract the time the tweet was done not sure which of these dates refer to that, whether they are the same or could be different in some case. Any link which explains the result field names with their actual meanings or at least help on the above.
Any help in this regard highly appreciated
Thanks
Vaibhav
You likely want trackback_date.
Consider the tweet: https://twitter.com/vipulved/status/314803292356096000
If you searched for "non-native platforms", Topsy API will return the gothick.org.uk URL shared in the tweet.
The trackback date on the result will be the date of the tweet.
The target_birth_date will be the date of the first tweet ever that linked to gothick.org.uk URL. This is a proxy for when the link was created.
I wrote a little Script using Python and Tweepy to save the tweets for a list of users and also to get some basic properties for those accounts.
Somehow the number of tweets stated in the user profile under statuses_count
(for an example of the json description of an account:
https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=TwitterAPI&include_entities=true )
does not match the number of tweets i get when iterating through the tweets of the same users profile.
I am aware of the fact, that twitter limits the number of tweets per user available through the API to 3200 and even does not guarantee this number, but this behavior does even occur with users who have well less than 3200 tweets
My question is, whether this difference is common and why this happens?
Is this just an issue of the twitter API, is it caused by deleted tweets (maybe they still count for statuses_count but can not be fetched anymore?), ...?
Thanks!
Thomas
I haven't messed with the Twitter API in several months, but I remember back when I was working with it I found inconsistencies due to retweets not showing up when iterating tweets, but getting counted in the number of Tweets. This seems to corroborate that, but its several months old and things may have changed since then.
Make sure include_rts is set to true, t, or 1 (in addition to specifying the same for include_entities, which you have done). When these aren't included by default (e.g. user lists) then you can get fewer tweets than what you specified with count.
The Twitter API documentation isn't clear on what the defaults are so it's safer to explicitly specify these optional parameters. And since you're specifically working with the user timeline you might also want exclude_replies turned off.
When I use FaceBook API for retrieving posts information, I found that the returned information are changing all the time.
for e.g., when I retrieved information 2 times with 1mins interval, one record appears in the 1st time, and disapeared in the 2nd time.
https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=baby&type=post&limit=100&since=2010-05-19&until=2010-05-21
Does anyone know what happen?
Cheers,
LingChen
Searches of large datasets are (in general) nondeterministic.