I've got a bunch of free online HTML, CSS, and JS tutorials under my belt and I want to try using them to make a browser extension. But I want to make sure that the data I want to use is actually accessible before getting started.
My goal is to make a browser extension for twitter.com that shows the number of impressions of any tweet next to the likes, retweets, and replies. My basic idea is to get the status URL of any given tweet, poll the Twitter API for the number of impressions of that tweet, store that in a variable, and then use CSS to display a little eye icon and the number stored in the impressions variable.
I know that I can find the number of impressions of all of my tweets, both through Twitter Analytics, and also just going to my profile page and clicking the little bar chart icon next to views, retweets, etc. But I'm not clear on whether I can do that for other people's tweets via Twitter's API or anything else. Can you?
For the record, I'm not too concerned about the varying definition of "impression," since it will be consistently applied across all tweets and I'm mostly interested in giving users a comparison between tweets. This is part of a research project to see how this might change how people engage with social media if they know how many views a given post has. If there's a simpler way to go about that using existing platforms, I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks for the advice!
No, impressions data is private. If you are authenticated to the Twitter API then you can use the new Twitter Developer Labs Tweets API to get private metrics like impressions, but you cannot get that for other people's Tweets. Also, the Twitter API does not support CORS, so I don't think you'll be successful trying to use it from a browser extension.
Related
I want to get the complete like list of a specific tweet, but the Twitter API only provided an API that can retrieve the 100 most recent users who liked the specific tweet. I also looked for Twitter crawlers on Github, but they all worked in a user-oriented manner, ie they can only get a list of liked tweets of a user, not a list of liking users of a specific tweet.
I also tried to crawl the list using selenium, but maybe due to my limited skill, it didn't work well. I don't want to spend a lot of time studying selenium and front-end knowledge just to accomplish a simple thing, so are there any open source codes or twitter APIs that can do this?
Yes. This has just been announced in the Twitter API v2.
Previously, you were limited to the 100 most recent Likes or Retweets with these endpoints. We heard your feedback that this was too limiting and have updated these endpoints to now return all results. To retrieve a complete list of Likes and Retweets, you can now use pagination.
Use the v2 Likes lookup endpoint: GET /2/tweets/:id/liking_users
I am new to Twitter and need some tips.
I need to display tweet feed from multiple users on some webpage.
The first thing I stumbled upon is Embedded Timelines. It allows to display tweets from list of users but the gotcha is that those lists should be maintained on Twitter-side (i.e. I cannot specify #qwe and #asd only on my side and get timeline without adding those users into list on Twitter-side).
The thing is that list of users that should be included into timeline is dynamic and managing those lists through Twitter API will probably be painful. Not to mention that my website will probably generate tons of those lists and I feel that I will violate some api quotas sooner or later.
So, my question is - am I stuck with using Embedded Timelines that refer some user list on Twitter-side and managing those lists through, say Twitter REST api, or there is a simplier way to do what I want?
It's pretty simple to display tweets for multiple users.
Links to start with
This post explains some of the search queries you can make
This post is a simple library to make requests to the twitter API that 'just works'
Your Query
Okay, so you want multiple users. The endpoint you're looking at using is the search/tweets one: https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json.
The query string uses :from and you can interpolate multiple froms with AND/OR.
An example query for the GET request:
?q=from:user1+OR+from:user2
Read more about the search API queries here.
Your "over-the-quote" issue
This is something you're going to need to figure out yourself - depending on the number of requests you expect to make, and the twitter imposed limits, maybe some sort of caching or saving information when you hit your limit, and only pull back from the cache whilst you're hitting your limit..
I am building a Twitter app and I'll be pulling a big amount of data from the user's timeline. For speed, I need to query the timeline in parallel. My aim is to pull 1000 of user's tweets from the API, but the upper limit of number of tweets per request is set to 200 by the Twitter API. Pagination works by specifying the last (oldest) tweet's ID from the previous request, so I need to know the result of the previous API call to make the next call. This method is not parallelizable. Is there any alternative method for getting the user timeline from the Twitter API where I can make parallel requests (there is the page property, but is deprecated and will be nonfunctional in the near future).
What you have to remember, is that Twitter have a difficult relationship with external developers. Using their API for anything interesting like this is simply not allowed by them.
What you need is access to the Firehose.
However, even if you're willing to pay a million dollars a year - Twitter aren't interested.
You could try getting it from a third party like Gnip but - again - likely to be expensive.
So, essentially, you can't. Twitter just aren't interested in amateur developers doing anything innovative with their platform. Sorry.
There have been quite a few number of start-up pertaining to analyzing Twitter data. There is CrowdBooster, then there is Klout, which use Twitter data to tell the user their True reach.
I have got the following two questions:
1) Is there a way to find out who has viewed one's tweet, or the number of people that have viewed a tweet. Crowdbooster claims to tell you how many impression one received per tweet. How do they do it?
2) Thousands and thousands of links are shared each day on Twitter. Can we find out which user has clicked the link in a tweet?
I have looked through Twitter API and some of the companies that have licensed Twitter's Firehose, but have not found anything that meet my needs.
Also, to give you a short answer to your 2nd question. Now that we've established that view analysis is impossible. Can you find out which user has clicked on that link, absolutely. And depending on what your talking about, user as far as the user who has clicked on the link or the user that has the link on their Twitter stream. Both are possible,
in the case of A, you would get the referring users IP address. Methods vary depending on language.
But what I think your asking for is scenario B, finding out which user has the link in their Twitter stream. This can be done by querying the link, the API response you will get can include tweet entities which will list all this information out for you and more. Open up a firehose with your link and watch what comes in.
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods
1) Is there a way to find out who has viewed one's tweet, or the
number of people that have viewed a tweet. Crowdbooster claims to tell
you how many impression one received per tweet. How do they do it?
No, in the case of a view - this would be impossible. The tweet impression can happen in multiple silos. On the website, in a widget, in a mobile app. You can imagine that it's simply not possible to get the impression of a tweet on a view because of this reason and because unlike a click, there is no I viewed this tweet identifier sent when a view has been enacted. I spent a great deal of time researching for a way to get the tweet impression even based on a similar clicked link and this is not even possible. (edit: it's possible see the last paragraph) This brings us to question 2.
2) Thousands and thousands of links are shared each day on Twitter.
Can we find out which user has clicked the link in a tweet?
Yes, what these websites are mainly doing is analyzing links that you process through their website. If you can have a unique hash marker on a link then analysis becomes possible. Without a unique hash marker, Twitter will re-interrupt two of the same links in a exactly the same way, even in the case that it shortens your link to it's custom t.co wrapper.
This means the only reliable way to do tweet analysis is by including a unique link marker code on your tweet and analyze the the fact that somebody that has hit your server has clicked on that link.
There is a somewhat hidden Twitter API feature that helps you understand how popular a particular link is. That being the link count API .. http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=
Something really outside of the box you can do if your set on analyzing multiple versions of exactly the same link without using markers and if your also using the Streaming (firehose) would be to analyze the tweet views (using the link count API) on similar links that hit your server. The link that got the +1 boost in view is the one that hit your server. But that's about the extent of creative analysis you can get with your tweets and more specifically the links, as mentioned links are the only thing your really able to analyze when it comes to Twitter.
1) Is there a way to find out who has viewed one's tweet, or the number of people that have viewed a tweet. Crowdbooster claims to tell you how many impression one received per tweet. How do they do it?
Yes, sign up for Twitter Analytics https://analytics.twitter.com (free service provided by Twitter) and you can see how many people view (impressions) for each tweet and totals for specific dates or a date range.
2) Thousands and thousands of links are shared each day on Twitter. Can we find out which user has clicked the link in a tweet?
Yes, you can do this. Using a URL shortening service like Bitly.com you can track how many clicks you had from Twitter (only give out that Bitly link on Twitter to do this). But if you want more indept information you may need to create a tracking software, as I don't know of any available. To do that you would need the tracking software to track the link and find out the refer header and see if it's from Twitter (or better yet, just give out a unique URL for your tweets), then you would need to use the Twitter API to find out the handle (username) of that visitor who clicked your link. Lastly store this information in a database so you can review who clicked what link.
I have seen numerous companies doing like Twitter lotteries where users got to retweet their tweet and then one of retweeters will get the prize or whatever.
I was wondering now how do they get the list of all retweeters or pick the winner?
I checked Twitter API and found only this thing: GET statuses/retweets/:id but it returns maximum of 100 retweeters. Is that the only way?
It looks likes there's a couple services out there doing almost exactly this. A quick google pulls up http://onekontest.com/ and there's a few other Twitter contest services, but they all seem to be different levels of broken since they haven't kept up with changes to the API.
As far as the Twitter API itself is concerned, if you were expecting more than 100 responses, I think using GET statuses/mentions makes the most sense. That API call returns any mentions of a user, and you can pass the flag include_rts to include any retweets of your tweets. Then, if you wanted to list RTs of a specific tweet, you could check the in_reply_to_status_id field in the returned data to see if it matches the original tweet ID. This API call only returns the last 800 status, 200 at a time, so if you expect a bunch of data, you would need to poll the API repeatedly over time to get all the tweets. I imagine services like favstar are doing exactly this, just on a larger scale.
If you're actually looking for code to do something like this, I wrote a sinatra app called twitter-rss-digest which handles querying Twitter over time to track different sorts of queries. It's pretty rough, and doesn't quite handle this specifically, but it might point you in the right direction if you want to code something.
The Twitter API has an endpoint that returns up to 100 retweeter IDs for a given tweet.
Note that for historical reasons, that endpoint only returns up to 100 results and the documentation about the cursor is useless. Twitter refused to fix the situation.
2013 note
That said, the first thread on the Developers site that surfaced in a quick google has #episod, a Twitter employee saying:
You can't likely get to all of them. The data is spread out. Your best bet is to use the REST API to determine many of the users who performed the retweet, but the data will still be constrained.
It's easiest to track retweets as they happen rather than try to find them from the past. Use the Streaming API for that.
I like muffinista's method, but I think if you want a 100% complete list of retweets, simply enable the retweet email notifications and write a script that polls the email box for those matching the subject "retweeted one of your Tweets!" and put the data into a table. Do this right from the start.
The site https://twren.ch/ enlists all the retweeters for a given tweet (note that it only enlists retweeters who are direct followers of the source tweeter.) Nevertheless its probably the only public source available.