Email to Twitter ID?

[TjL]

Q: Is there a way in the API to input an email address and output a
twitter username? I couldn't see anything in the API.

Background (for those who may be interested :-)

When TwitReport gets an email-forward from a user, it comes in
basically two formats:

1) Automatically forwarded by Gmail filter

2) Not Gmail

Gmail (and perhaps some other clients) will forward and maintain all
of the headers.

Most other mail clients, including Apple's Mail.app, will forward, but
will not maintain all of the headers.

This means that the headers telling me the Twitter username of the
person who sent me the email is lost.

WITH the Twitter username of the person requesting the TwitReport, I
can show some nice relationship graphs based on mutual followers, etc.

Without that, however, the reports are a lot less interesting.

Without an API way to make this lookup, I have a few (bad) options:

1) Scrape the content of the email looking for the name by looking for
the "Hi, RealName (TwitterName)."

2) Just don't offer this improved functionality

3) Maintain my own list/database of email addresses <--> Twitter
usernames that I manually compile/update.

4) Convince all users to switch to Gmail/Google Apps

I started with #1, got frustrated and gave up, moved to #2, and am now
getting requests for this functionality so I'm thinking about #1 vs #3
although frankly #4 is the best solution :-)

TjL

[Abraham Williams]

http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?email=al...@twitter.com

That parameter used to be in the API Docs but is missing now.

--
Abraham Williams | http://the.hackerconundrum.com
Web608 | Community Evangelist | http://web608.org
This email is: [ ] blogable [x] ask first [ ] private.

[Doug Williams]

There is no supported way to get a user ID given an email address. The undocumented parameter Abraham mentioned has been deprecated and will cease to work shortly.

Doug Williams
Twitter API Support
http://twitter.com/dougw

[TjL]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Doug Williams <do...@twitter.com> wrote:
>
> There is no supported way to get a user ID given an email address. The
> undocumented parameter Abraham mentioned has been deprecated and will cease
> to work shortly.

Will it be replaced by another way?

Seems like an obvious feature to be missing.

[Abraham Williams]

I can't find documentation anywhere of the deprecation. It seems like deprecations should be announced better then new features so developers can make the modifications before their application breaks.

Sent from: Madison WI United States.

[Doug Williams]

Abraham,
When looking at the logs we saw little evidence of intended use and an abundance of spam activity. Thus, we decided to remove the parameter for security and privacy concerns.

You are correct, deprecation should be better documented and we will do a better job of publicly describing the removal of features in the future.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Doug Williams
Twitter API Support
http://twitter.com/dougw

[TjL]

I've made a suggestion that this be left for authenticated API calls
and/or registered developers:

http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=353

I'm glad TwitterCo is being proactive in protecting this information,
but there's a lot of utility to be had keeping it for the legit users.

TjL