How to crawl retweets of a certain user? - twitter

I studied the Twitter API Documentation today. Only find that we could use "Twitter REST API Method: statuses user_timeline" to acquire statuses of a certain user. Retweets are stripped out of the user_timeline for backwards compatibility reasons. If I want retweets included, API Documentation recommend "statuses retweeted_by_me", but retweeted_by_me cannot return the retweets by other users.
I think maybe we can analyse the twitter webpage of a certain user to get his retweets. However is there any elegant way to crawl retweets of a certain user?
Thanks in advance!

This was addressed recently by the Twitter devs. You can now add a include_rts=true to your call to user_timeline. See the full discussion here: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/7a4be385ff549ed0

You want to use the retweeted_to_me API call and then create a union with user_timeline and sort by datetime. It's a little annoying that they don't mix the stream for you.

Call statuses/user_timeline for the specific user then for each status you will have to call either statuses/id/retweeted_by or statuses/retweets.
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-GET-statuses-id-retweeted_by
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-statuses-retweets

You have to manually use GET statuses/retweets/:id for every Tweet from the use_timeline.

Related

Is there any methods to get the like list of a tweet?

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

Is there a workaround for non-premium Twitter developers for getting reply_count?

Does anyone know of a solution for checking if a tweet has replies or not, without checking the reply_count field of the JSON response?
I'm building a crawler and already have a method for scraping a timeline for tweets as well as replies to tweets. In order to increase efficiency I want to find out if a tweet has any replies at all before calling my reply method. I have a standard developer account with Twitter so I do not have access to reply_count.
Looking for this as well. Only way I found was scraping the page (which is against the Terms of Service)
reply-count-aria-${tweet.id_str}.*?(\d+) replies

How should I get all the tweets of an specific hashtag?

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.

How do I know if a specific twitter user is online or not?

How do I know if a specific twitter user is currently online by writing programs? Is there any API or data field in the web page showing this information? Both browsing Twitter webpage and using Twitter app are considered "online".
Although this information is not readily available, you can do a work around. Make use of Twitter's Streaming API: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/streams/public (have a read through this document).
You'll most likely be using the POST Statuses/filter functionality (read the doc here: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/post/statuses/filter ), which will give you a JSON object with tweets based on your filters.
Make use of the parameters you'll need to specify in the URL to filter the stream (have a look through this document to learn more about it: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/parameters ), in your case it'll be the follow parameter. You basically specify the twitter ID of the user you want to follow. Here's a sample JSON result of the streaming API in action https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json?follow=25365536 - this one in particular is following Kim Kardashian. Keep in mind that this will give you:
Tweets created by the user.
Tweets which are retweeted by the user.
Replies to any Tweet created by the user.
Retweets of any Tweet created by the user.
So in order to just stream the tweets of your desired user, you'll have to use a programming language of your choice to parse through the JSON object to find the user that actually sent the tweet (this is a little tricky, you'll have to look through the properties of the JSON object to figure it out). Once you narrow the streaming tweets to just the ones from the user though, you can then have an alert on when new tweets by this user stream and that will tell you if the user is online/using twitter at the moment.
It's not clear what you mean by "online" (browsing twitter.com? Using a Twitter app?), but in any case Twitter doesn't provide such information, thankfully.
I'm afraid such information is limited by Twitter and is not available. However you can put your question on https://dev.twitter.com/discussions and ask its developers. Good Luck
you need get user state first
then filter if around current time
then get ids
they are online
use twitter developer api
I do it for my website

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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