Social Graph Methods: Removal of Pagination

[Wilhelm Bierbaum]

As previously announced by Alex Payne on September 24th (see http://bit.ly/46x1iL), we're removing support for pagination from the /friends/ids and /followers/ids methods. 

As of that time we set a hard deadline of October 26th, 2009. The original date has passed as we tried to give all of our partners extra time, but we are going to need to make the change now.

On Monday, November 16th, the "page" parameter will be ignored by the /friends/ids and /followers/ids methods and we will only be supporting cursors.

Unfortunately, due to architectural considerations, cursor identifiers are not predictable. This means that you will have to extract the next and previous cursor identifiers from the results returned to you.

For example, to get Obama's followers, we would first perform a GET against:

http://twitter.com/followers/ids/barackobama.xml?cursor=-1

Which returns XML similar to:

<id_list>

  <ids> 

    <id>30592818</id> 

    (... more ids ...)

  </ids>

  <next_cursor>1319042195162293654</next_cursor>

  <previous_cursor>-8675309</previous_cursor>

</id_list>

To retrieve the next 5000 IDs, we would then perform a GET against:

http://twitter.com/followers/ids/barackobama.xml?cursor=1319042195162293654

Note that cursors are signed 64-bit integers.

Please refer to the documentation for our social graph methods for more information:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-friends+ids

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-followers+ids

Thanks!

-- 

Wilhelm Bierbaum

Twitter Platform Team