in lieu of @replies, need better filters for applications

[Ivan]

Hi,

The recent @replies issue is a big problem for applications.

I think either the user needs to be given control, or API access needs
to be more flexible.

There are a multitude of apps that act like an echo of a set of users.
That is a really hard problem to solve if you aren't following the
whole set. In place of getting the friend stream, you would need to
poll each individually. With the API access limits, that inherently
prevents an app to scale beyond a few thousand users.

For example, in Tipjoy, we look for payment commands. We do this in 3
ways:
- Poll the search API across all Twitter users for keyword like 'tip'
'give' ,etc. Lots of users tweet the letter 'p' though
- Poll that same search but for an individual user in Tipjoy. This
takes a long time to cycle through all our users
- Poll @tipjoy's friends_timeline looking for payments

The third is by far the best option. But the change hurts the effort
as any payment from a user formatted like:
"@ev p $2" wouldn't get caught.


Another app I'm building is @tatatweet**. It takes a set of twitter
users, and feeds their tweets to a single account. For example,
@TeamTipjoy is a test account that feeds tweets from Tipjoy employees.

Rather than poll each account individually, the app will make the
target account follow the sources. But every tweet starting with an
@reply will get filtered out, for no good reason as far as the app is
concerned.


I think one potential solution (in case the product people don't act)
is to give apps the ability to poll a set of users, with raw tweets
and all @replies. The model of having an app "follow" a user is a bit
klunky anyway.

Enable api endpoints to create, edit and share filters, which are sets
of users and perhaps a regex in place to filter the users. This would
also prevent the annoying following limits from being a problem. If a
user account is protected, mandate that your service authenticate as
the user to add them to the filter.

I'd pay for this.


Generally, changes put in place for a better user experience shouldn't
hurt applications. Users and apps are different.

Best,
Ivan
http://tipjoy.com

** @tatatweet is an open source premium twitter app built using
Tipjoy's API http://bit.ly/git_tatatweet
Please copy the code