So I came across this Twitter account while I was wasting time on Failblog. I became very intrigued by it. The way it works is this person tweets 'I think you mean "sneak peek"' whenever someone tweets something with the string "sneak peak" in it. And it is automated as I discovered by tweeting "Sneak peak" myself, and getting a response within seconds:
So my question is, how is this done?
Can you get notifications somehow when someone tweets something containing a certain string? Consider that this already happens when someone tweets your username, so it is technically possible.
Or does this person have a computer running all the time that searches twitter every few seconds for the string?
Or are both possible?
This almost certainly uses the Twitter Streaming API.
The set of streaming APIs offered by Twitter give developers low latency access to Twitter's global stream of Tweet data. A proper implementation of a streaming client will be pushed messages indicating Tweets and other events have occurred, without any of the overhead associated with polling a REST endpoint.
So, there is a server somewhere which is continually streaming the Twitter API, filtered for the specific term.
Whenever the server sees a new tweet come through the stream, it tweets the response automatically.
So, to answer your questions:
1) Yes.
2) Yes, but it's not constantly polling, it's receiving the data automatically.
Not sure about 1), but 2) is easily manageable using the search API :
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=sneak%20peak will get you the recent tweets containing 'sneak peak'. (including the time of the tweet)
Then the program can answer to those people, and keeping the time of the tweet in order to not tweet to people which the program has already tweeted to.
Related
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.
I have a website which allows the user to tweet using a specific hashtag, would their be anyway to actually find out if the user has really tweeted.
I was thinking of looking at the timestamps and just working out the difference between right now and when the last tweet was made but that's not really professional.
I know Facebook allows you to do this quite easily but I'm struggling to figure out the best solution.
any ideas?
Regards
Retrieve the tweets of the user in question
Scan the text of each tweet, looking for your hashtag.
If you know when they visited your website, compare the time of the visit to the time of the tweet.
If you need to ensure the users tweets, then tweet for the user by requesting authorization and then tweeting via the API. This will still not stop the users from deleting the tweet.
If you plan any reward scheme, you won't be able to force users to keep the tweet (and probably the twitter API ToS forbid such things).
You want to use the Twitter STREAM API. One of the public stream is the Filter Stream.
This stream give the possibility to specify keywords/hashtags that you want to follow in live.
You can simply track the hashtag that you want and then you will receive in live all the tweets posted with your hashtag.
You can then simply check the json property user and compare the id/screen_name to the user you want to identify.
I'm trying to develop some code in order to get all the tweets that were generated with certain hashtags, then parse them and finally analyse them. I believe I've already thought and solve the last two parts of this but I'm having some trouble with the first one. I've already read the Twitter Search API documentation but I haven't realised yet how to do this. Can anyone help me?
If you want to retrieve the tweets sent recently, you should use the search/tweets endpoint of twitter' REST API, and mention the hashtag inside q parameter
In case you want to listen to tweets containing the hashtag and receive them in real time, then twitter's streaming API is what you should use (statuses/filter endPoint).
Have a look at the documentation on twitter's website, there's also plenty of information on how to do this all around the web.
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.
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.