Outbound HTTP notification from Twitter.com?

[Yoz Grahame]

Firstly, apologies in advance if this has been discussed before - a
search turned up nothing.

In order to run an external Twitter-consuming service that responds to
messages quickly, one basically needs to run a Jabber bot so as not to
run into API rate-limiting problems. This is a right pain for those of
us who don't have server accounts which let us run long-running
processes (for example, Dreamhost will kill any process that runs for
more than half an hour).

Alex: How about setting up a new HTTP notification option to go
alongside Jabber and SMS? I'm thinking of something where the user
specifies a notification URL for their Twitter account, and on a
notification, twitter.com will POST an XML document - of the same
format currently returned by the API - to that URL. It'll do this for
all common kinds of notification - tweets from followees, direct
messages and track alerts. (No, I'm not asking for the public timeline
to work this way as well)

I'm currently writing my first web-based Twitter app, and this would
be immensely useful in many ways - mainly so I can write my web app as
just a web app rather than a marriage of web app and daemon, and then
find somewhere to host the daemon.

-- Yoz

[xunker]

I'm working on a service that needs to do quick responding, and I've
actually found that using email is also very easy. You can set up
your 'bot to read the emails that twitter sends when someone follows
you, a friend tweets or someone direct messages you. It takes some
regular expression work to pull about the message but once you do you
have basically a "push" service for your app.

--Matthew

[Andrew Badera]

relatively high latency. unreliable.

[xunker]

Latency all depends on your mail host and theirs (on average I'm
experiencing ~10s latency offpeak at up to ~30 on high usage days) and
what "high latency" means to the individual product. As for
reliability, it's as reliable as email so it all depends on how
reliable you feel your email pathway and provider is.

My point being, at the moment it's one of the options.

On May 5, 3:42 am, "Andrew Badera" <and...@badera.us> wrote:
> relatively high latency. unreliable.

[Alex Payne]

We're going to be putting more work into our Jabber infrastructure and
supporting the PubSub standard. Custom HTTP- or socket-based
solutions aren't really on our development radar right now.

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