What does Twitter API favourites_count indicate? - twitter

Quick question, I'm having trouble finding this info on the Twitter dev centre.
On the object for a tweet, in the user section there is 'favourites_count', what exactly does this imply? Is that how many tweets they themsevles have favourited? or is it perhaps how many of their tweets have been favourited? Or is it something else?

It's the number of tweets that given user has marked as favorite.
I check'd this with an API call with my own screen name.

The number of Tweets this user has liked in the account’s lifetime. British spelling used in the field name for historical reasons.

Related

How to find out if a user has actually Tweeted?

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.

How can I get twitter current user's gender

I have reviewed the twitter documentation #anywhere
where I can use User Object Properties but in the userdata I don't find the gender property.
When you create a twitter account it never asks for gender, so you cant get it through the API.
You would need some kind of AI to determine it.
Demographic data such as gender and age are not available from the API -- and not always appropriate as Twitter accounts can represent many things not limited to persons alive or dead.
Latest answer #2016
You still can't get twitter users' gender but can you can deduce it with some workable apis.
See node-cheat gender_by_name for all reasonable and tested solutions.

Twitter messages on website with votes

I am not sure how it is done, therefore my questions below:
I would like to ask folks on Twitter for a suggestion on a particular topic. Can I tell them to use certain hashtag and have all comments with that hashtag posted on my site?
Do I just pick a hashtag or does it need to be created somehow?
Can I have users on my site rate those suggestions? In that case, would I need to somehow grab twitter message and store locally?
Just trying to understand the process in order to implement it.
Hashtags don't have to be created - just use it in tweet.
In order to get all tweets with particular hashtag, use search API: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/search and search for this hashtag. You should save all relevant tweets (twitter search is not reliable on old tweets).

Find the number of times a tweet has been viewed

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.

How to get a list of all retweeters in Twitter?

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.

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