API Update: direct messages improvements

[Alex Payne]

Later today we're going to be rolling out two improves to the direct
messages API methods:

1. There will now be "sender" and "recipient" elements that contain
the standard user attributes inline with every direct message. This
saves you an API request if you need to know more about the sender or
recipient of a message than just her ID or screen name. The existing
sender_id, recipient_id, sender_screen_name, and
recipient_screen_name attributes will be deprecated next month.

2. You can now retrieve a list of direct messages sent by the
authenticating user at:

http://twitter.com/direct_messages/sent.[format]

The available formats are XML and JSON for now; RSS and Atom will be
added once we sort out a bug.

Both changes will be documented, as always, at: http://
groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/web/api-documentation

Enjoy!

--
Alex Payne
http://twitter.com/al3x

[dean.j.robinson]

Awesome stuff Alex, thank you for adding these to the API.

When I get back from my weeks holidays I'll add the to Hahlo.

[Bluespark]

Hi Alex.

Something related to the Direct Message API, I noticed that now I have
been using Twitter for some time, I have a huge amount of direct
messages and it currently was taking over 10s to download all these
messages.

Could you add an optional parameter called "count" that would return
the x most recent messages a returned. Even better, if it could be
called with a count and since_id (return the last 20 messages since
message 5173152 so messages could be paged?)

The limiting of messages via count should be done as I am getting a
some pretty big files coming back.

Thanks heaps. John.

[Alex Payne]

You're quite right, we should be paginating these results. I'll make
that change today and inform the list.

--
Alex Payne
http://twitter.com/al3x

[Bluespark]

Just saw the update via the api_updates twitter feed, (man twitter is
cool).
Sweet, like the pagination. Thats perfect!

John.

On Jul 10, 7:18 am, Alex Payne <a...@al3x.net> wrote:
> You're quite right, we should be paginating these results. I'll make
> that change today and inform the list.
>
> --

> Alex Paynehttp://twitter.com/al3x

[Cameron Kaiser]

> Just saw the update via the api_updates twitter feed, (man twitter is
> cool).

twitter(1) July 9, 2007 twitter(1)

NAME
twitter

SYNOPSIS
...
Bah, I've had too much caffeine this afternoon.

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