I have successfully gotten a bunch of Twitter user_ids using the Twitter API resource "GET friends/ids".
I need to be able to get all screen names from Twitter without hitting the rate limit. I know I can use "GET friendships/show" to get the "screen_name", but to do that, I would have to loop through all of the user_ids, each one being a request, thereby potentially hitting the rate limit.
Does anyone know of a way to send an array of user_ids, in one request? Or... any other ideas or methods?
You can use the users/lookup API? I believe you can send a list of upto 100 userids in one request and it will send back a fair bit of info about each one, including their last tweet. As it says in the docs
It's also well suited for use in tandem with friends/ids and followers/ids.
I think this will solve your problem.
Related
I just learn about Twitter for couple of days. I 'm facing a problems in building an app that add a large number of users to block list via Twitter Api (POST blocks/list ). But this Api is only work with one user per request, using it will lead to 'API RATE LIMIT'. That I want here is a method that can add a lot of users to the block list via one request Can anyone help me overcome this problem ? Thank and best regards. Like this site http://blocktogether.org/
You're getting two things confused.
There is GET blocks/list which allows you to receive a list of a blocked users.
On the other hand POST blocks/create allows you to block users from your twitter account. I believe that's the one you're wanting.
Either way they're both rate limited and you'll need to send multiple requests to the twitter API in order to reach whatever number you're looking into adding. As of now, until twitter decides to change it, it's only 1 user at a time.
I have a list of tweets that are using a hashtag I made. I'm getting these tweets using the search api. All I want is to get the number of retweets. I DO NOT need to post on their behalf. It seams ridiculous that I would need to have every single user login to my site, login to twitter and approve my application via OAUTH for EVERY TWEET IN MY LIST. There's gotta be a way to get that number without the need for oauth.
I tried getting it directly from the search api, but that's not consistently there. I've tried https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/275729088709283840.json but that doesn't work, for some reason. Is there anyway to do this extremely simple task without going down the asinine road of user-interaction?
You have to create a background-process that uses the stream API. Phirehose is a php library that is set up to do this: https://github.com/fennb/phirehose
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.
I'm trying to write a program that will retrieve all of the tweets the user has seen on their twitter home timeline (ie, from people their following, as they would see at twitter.com). I realise this is a lot of data, and the rest API has limitations.
What would be the be best way to do this? Slowly retrieve the last 200 or whatever the limit is tweets, keeping in mind the 350 requests per hour limit? Or is there some hard limit to how far back I can go even with that?
The streaming API only streams from current point on I believe, so I don't think this is an option. This is a personal project so I can't pay very much for any elevated access or anything.
Yes, there is a limit to how far back you can go:
Clients may access a theoretical
maximum of 3,200 statuses via the page
and count parameters for the
user_timeline REST API methods. Other
timeline methods have a theoretical
maximum of 800 statuses. Requests for
more than the limit will result in a
reply with a status code of 200 and an
empty result in the format requested.
Twitter still maintains a database of
all the tweets sent by a user.
However, to ensure performance of the
site, this artificial limit is
temporarily in place.
Source: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/every_developer
As you mentioned, you will need to go page by page through each of the 200 max results that come back until you hit that limit and get the empty result set, making sure not to hit the 350 requests per hour. There might also be gaps depending on how many tweets the user has on their timeline.
What I'm trying to do is pull some search results, and sort them by users.
Right now I'm using
$to->OAuthRequest('http://search.twitter.com/search.json', array('q' => 'search-term'), 'GET');
to get the results, but I can't actually get information about the user like follower_count, etc. so I though I'd take each result's user_id, and run it through http://twitter.com/users/show.xml to get the rest of the information.
The problem is, if I get 50 results that way, that's 50 API calls, which is 1/3 of the hourly limit...
Is there a better way to do this?
Update:
I have requested whitelisting, and the guys at Twitter told me I should instead use the new Streaming API.
This kinda sucks since it's in Alpha testing, and the documentation is unclear, but the concept looks cool, and the limits are different than the regular API. Gonna dive into it later.
Only reliable user information you can get from twitter search results are username (from_user) and profile image url. If you want more information, you will have to call the users/show method for each user. There is no workaround or better way(that I'm aware of).
You will have to Cache user information and request whitelisting.