Discussion on api-documentation

[ander...@abiro.com]

Could you please add a specification for the responses from
friends_timeline and the other responses as well?

Thanks in advance.

[Alex Payne]

Will do, Anders.

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

[ander...@abiro.com]

I fixed it, both ways. Even though the XML timeline says UTF-8 it
still seems to be pure Unicode, but maybe that's correct. The update
message should be in URL encoded UTF-8. Now my mobile Twitter client
can be used for any language (at least in theory). Hooray :).

[Alex Payne]

We'll look into what's correct, standards-wise, but I'm glad you
figured it out for your app, Anders. Good luck!

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

[ander...@abiro.com]

Note on authentication: e-mail address is not needed. Screen name
works fine.

[Alex Payne]

You need to be making this request while authenticated (and double-
check your URL) but you shouldn't need to set up Instant Messaging.

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

On Apr 22, 2007, at 12:39 AM, ander...@abiro.com wrote:

>
> direct_messages and new always return 404 "User not found". Should
> they work? Needed to set up Instant Messaging in my account?
>

[Alex Payne]

Fixed. Thank you, Anders. Feel free to correct the documentation
yourself in the future. I appreciate your detailed feedback.

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

On Apr 22, 2007, at 8:41 AM, ander...@abiro.com wrote:

>
> It's said early on that updates and direct messages need POST, but if
> so the syntax is wrong for 'update' and 'new' (arguments part of the
> URL). Also, it says at 'update' that it needs POST, but not at 'new'.
>

[Alex Payne]

I'm puzzled about this. The documentation currently shows that a
format is required, and we haven't had any reports of that not
working. There's no reason to stay away from direct messages via the
API; we have plenty of bots successfully using them.

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

On Apr 22, 2007, at 8:47 AM, ander...@abiro.com wrote:

>
> Also, the syntax for 'new' is wrong in that the file type is not shown
> in the URL.
>
> I'll stay away from direct messages for now.
>

[ander...@abiro.com]

I referred to an old version of the documentation, and sent to myself.
This works fine with the documented syntax. Sorry about that.

[ander...@abiro.com]

user_timeline for a given ID doesn't require basic authentication.
Right or wrong?

[Mario Menti]

On 4/25/07, ander...@abiro.com <ander...@abiro.com> wrote:
>
> user_timeline for a given ID doesn't require basic authentication.
> Right or wrong?

Since you can see a user's timeline on the web without being logged
into twitter (given they don't protect their updates), I go for
"right".

Mario.

[ander...@abiro.com]

True. Makes sense if the updates are not protected.

[Alex Payne]

Correct. We don't require authentication for the user_timeline and
friends_timeline of non-protected users. This is largely so that we
can implement our badges that pull from those API methods.

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

[Bill Glover]

I've written a little TweetSL "Tweetsule" client for Second Life that
can read (up to five) twitter entries from public or friends, but I
don't have the ability to do basic auth in the header, so I can't post
updates yet. The new Auth API will be great, but in the meantime could
you post the paramters for paramter based auth (even if it's
unsupported). I could use that for updates in the meantime.
Bill

[Bill Glover]

Ok duh. I didn't read the Fan Wiki entry on Basic Auth first. I've
never seen URL form of Basic Auth before, neat. For anyone following
along here's the example:
http://username:pass...@twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml

[Lode]

Is there a way to get more than the last 20 updates? I'm working on
integrating twitter with my blog, and I'd like to import all my
updates. I've got a nice twitter plugin for wordpress, but alas the
api only gives 20 updates. Do I have to resort to writing a regular
expression and parsing the html pages, or is there a secret parameter
I can use to get the last "x" updates?

[Guillaume]

Hello,
I tried
> curl -v -u guillaume7:XXXX http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=Yo
I got
< HTTP/1.0 200 OK
for an answer, but I don't see my message updated in my http://twitter.com/home.
Am I doing something wrong?
Guillaume

[Guillaume]

> > curl -v -u guillaume7:XXXXhttp://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=Yo

> Am I doing something wrong?

Got it!

> curl -v -d status=Hohoho -u guillaume7:XXXX http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Sorry for bothering ya,
G.

[Aral Balkan]

Added a note regarding the return value of the featured call (JSON).

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/web/api-documentation
- or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't
work.

[redsmurph]

I made a few changes:
- Added username to basic authentication. You might not want to
promote that, but it definitely works.
- Added XML response information to HTTP Requests. Don't know about
the other file types, but this should apply also to JSON.
- Made better paragraph separations.
- Fixed a few typos.

[Alex Payne]

Thanks, Anders! Contributions are always welcome.

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

[edward.v...@gmail.com]

Is there an API method to delete an individual private
message from the queue?

Ed

[Alex Payne]

Not at the moment, but I'll add that in. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Aral Balkan]

Could someone with admin privileges please revert the main API doc to
version 29. The HTML editor didn't like my adding an achor tag and
replicated it for every paragraph :(

[Alex Payne]

Done. No worries, Aral.

[JJ Merelo]

Any hint on how to send latin1 stuff as statuses? When I try something
like "Esto está cañón", even if the response from twitter is correct,
only "Esto est" will be shown in the status.

[Alex Payne]

I'd suggest URL encoding what you send to us. Seems to work for most
international users.

[JJ Merelo]

2007/5/14, Alex Payne <al...@al3x.net>:

I'd suggest URL encoding what you send to us.  Seems to work for most
international users.

The library I use, HTTP::Request::Common, does that automatically.

JJ

[Cameron Kaiser]

> > I'd suggest URL encoding what you send to us. Seems to work for most
> > international users.
>
> The library I use, HTTP::Request::Common, does that automatically.

Silly question, but the Perl you're using is fully UTF-8, right?

--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * cka...@floodgap.com
-- Software sucks because users demand it to. -- Nathan Mhyrvold, Microsoft ---

[JJ Merelo]

OK, this seemed to do the trick:
--
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST);
use XML::Simple;
use utf8;

my $status = shift;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
utf8::upgrade( $status );
my $req = POST 'http://aap_ugr:xxx...@twitter.com/statuses/
update.xml',
[ status => $status ];
my $res = $ua->request($req);
if ($res->is_success) {
my $respuesta=XMLin($res->content);
print "El mensaje ", $respuesta->{'text'}, " ha recibido el ID ",
$respuesta->{'id'}, "\n";
} else {
die $res->status_line;
}
--

JJ

[keaton...@gmail.com]

Umm, how would you find out the number of tweets a user has posted?

[Alex Payne]

See the users/show API method. It returns a statuses_count element
that contains the number of updates a user has posted.

On 6/28/07, keaton...@gmail.com <keaton...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Umm, how would you find out the number of tweets a user has posted?
>
>

[BarryCarlyon]

Greetings

im trying to use the http basic auth with php and i have had to luck,
using either fsocketopen. or indeed fopen.

Please Help

Barry Carlyon

[Blaine Cook]

Hi all,

I've made a (hopefully minor) change to the Twitter API. The /statuses/
friends method will now return a maximum of 100 friends, ordered by
the time of their most recent Twitter.

While it may, in some cases, be necessary to use the /statuses/friends
method call, we strongly recommend using /statuses/friends_timeline
instead. We haven't made any firm decisions, but my current thinking
is that the /statuses/friends method will be deprecated in favour of /
statuses/friends_timeline.

It would be very helpful for us if those of you with use cases for
the /statuses/friends method could provide a brief description of your
use case.

Thanks!

Blaine Cook
Twitter - http://twitter.com/blaine

[Lance Weber]

I've been wanting to see/write a Friend Recommendation service that
grabs a list of all my friends then scans their friend lists and
aggregates results giving me a list of recommended new friends
weighted by connections with current friends.

For that to work, I need to be able to get a complete list of friends
not just for the current authorized user, but any user. Is something
like this in the works? This really comes down to deciding to support
third party social network analytics efforts...

On Jul 6, 11:54 pm, Blaine Cook <rom...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>

> I've made a (hopefully minor) change to the Twitter API. The /statuses/friendsmethod will now return a maximum of 100friends, ordered by

> the time of their most recent Twitter.
>
> While it may, in some cases, be necessary to use the /statuses/friends
> method call, we strongly recommend using /statuses/friends_timeline
> instead. We haven't made any firm decisions, but my current thinking

> is that the /statuses/friendsmethod will be deprecated in favour of /

> statuses/friends_timeline.
>
> It would be very helpful for us if those of you with use cases for

> the /statuses/friendsmethod could provide a brief description of your

> use case.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Blaine Cook
> Twitter -http://twitter.com/blaine
>

> Click onhttp://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/web/api-docum...

[Alex Payne]

There are already a couple sites that do this for Twitter. My
favorite: http://twitter.caboo.se/

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

[Ed Finkler]

On 7/7/07, Blaine Cook <rom...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It would be very helpful for us if those of you with use cases for
> the /statuses/friends method could provide a brief description of your
> use case.

I like it from the standpoint of getting a list of all the
authenticated user's friends. In the new version of Spaz, I'm using
it to provide a sort of "directory" to the user, where they can click
on a user's avatar and get their profile info. If performance was an
issue, I'd be able to live without each friend's most recent status.

--
- Ed Finkler
http://funkatron.com/

[Lance Weber]

Okay, which API calls are they using to generate a list of UserX's
friends?

On Jul 11, 2:19 pm, Alex Payne <a...@al3x.net> wrote:
> There are already a couple sites that do this for Twitter. My
> favorite:http://twitter.caboo.se/
>
> --

> Alex Paynehttp://twitter.com/al3x

[georg...@gmail.com]

Hello,

I'm playing with the API. Everything works perfect so far. The only
thing that I could not make is displaying an arbitrary text of the
agent that posted the update. I see some people have it like "from
web", "from txt", "from twitterrific", etc. I've tried adding User
Agent header but it did not work. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
George

[Mark Phillip]

Hey Arlo, this is done on a case-by-case basis by the folks at Twitter.

 

Check out this thread to hear it from the source:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/efb69d3bbeea7551/

Thanks,
Mark
areyouwatchingthis.com

[Aral Balkan]

The featured() method (JSON format) no longer returns a callback
function but the data itself so it's now consistent with the other
functions. I removed my note about this from the wiki. Thanks, guys!

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/web/api-documentation

[kentbr...@gmail.com]

Hey, so I'm playing with this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/bob.json?callback=foo

... which works as expected.When I try this, however:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/bob.json?callback=bar

... I still get my results wrapped in foo. I'm almost positive this is
not local caching at my end; cURL gives me the same results as my
browser, and it isn't caching anything.

While I understand the need to ease the load on Twitter's servers,
this will almost certainly break the experience for any user who
visits one site that depends on callback foo and then visits another
site that depends on callback bar, if both of those sites query for
the same friends_timeline. (Which is easy to do, for bob-the-example-
user.)

[after fiddling some more]

When I tried this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/net.json

... and then this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/net.json?callback=bob

... I got no callback with the second call, and when I tried this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/kent.json?callback=foo

... and then this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/kent.json

... I got the callback with the second call, even though I didn't ask
for it.

Thanks for building the API!

--Kent

[kentbr...@gmail.com]

Oh, almost forgot: it would be very nice if I could use dots and
square brackets in my callback name. Like so:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/bob.json?callback=mything.myfunc[0]

When I try this, I get mythingmyfunc0 back from the API as my
callback.

Thanks again,

--Kent

[Alex Payne]

Thanks for the detailed bug report, Kent. We'll look into it.

[kentbr...@gmail.com]

Hey, it would be great if calls like these:

http://twitter.com/friendships/create/tantek.json?callback=foo
http://twitter.com/friendships/destroy/tantek.json?callback=foo

... gave back error messages in the same format as their success
messages. If I do the wrong thing with either API, I get this:

You are not friends with the specified user.
You are already friends with the specified user.

... where I ought to get something like this:

foo({"error":"You are not friends with the specified user."});
foo({"error":"You are already friends with the specified user."});

Ditto the page that comes up when I hit Cancel or the three-try limit
on any call that pops up the auth box, like this one:

http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.format

Thanks again,

--Kent

[Alex Payne]

We do that in a couple places around the API, but I'll try to make
sure it's consistent. Thanks for the suggestion, Kent.

[funkatron]

User 'JJJrg' replaced the entire page of docs with a spam link. I
couldn't sort out a way to roll back the whole change, so for now I
just saved a new version over it. Alex, maybe you can do that?

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/web/api-documentation

[Ed Finkler]

Actually, it looks like he did it to all four pages. Classy. I did the
same to the other three.

--
--
Ed Finkler
http://funkatron.com
AIM: funka7ron
ICQ: 3922133
Skype: funka7ron

[Alex Payne]

Thanks, Ed. I've reverted all the pages. Some people.

[kulde...@gmail.com]

Hi,
Is there any way we can send direct messages with HTML tags. e.g.
Anchor tag.

Thanks
Kuldeep

[Cameron Kaiser]

> Is there any way we can send direct messages with HTML tags. e.g.
> Anchor tag.

This is in the archive, but in the past the developers have stated there
are no plans to allow it for security reasons.

If you want a link, the easiest thing is just to send a URL and let the
Twitter parser recognize it.

--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * cka...@floodgap.com

-- FORTUNE: Good day for heavy drinking. Start spiking the office water cooler.

[thomas...@gmail.com]

Is there a method in here to pluck a certain piece of data (like a
regular expression) from a twit, or is it just assumed that if we
wanted it we could construct our own by analyzing message text?

[Alex Payne]

Extracting data from our API responses is left as an exercise for the
developer :)

[Jacobr]

http://twitter.com/direct_messages.xml is returning HTTP:

Here's my header - but I'm CERTAIN that I'm calling

http://twitter.com/direct_messages.xml

Any suggestions?

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Connection: close Expires: Tue, 25 Dec 2007 20:00:41
GMT Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2007 19:55:41 GMT Server: hi X-Runtime: 0.45907
Vary: Accept-Encoding Status: 200 OK Cache-Control: private, max-
age=0, must-revalidate, max-age=300 Set-Cookie:
_twitter_session=1c057dbb2030c10649e8aaeefb040089;
domain=.twitter.com; path=/ ETag: "5e987f7eda84b74d2e501484ca7d2cce"
P3P: CP="NOI DSP COR NID ADMa OPTa OUR NOR" Via: 1.1
jatayu.twitter.com Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

[rads]

using the befriend method i can follow a twitterid, likewise is there
any method to switch on the notifications for the twitterid whom im
following??

[jbos...@gmail.com]

Hi, I'm creating a Java based client side swing app which should
provide easy access to your functionality from inside a number of
OS's, however as my caching is far from optimal (can't do it all at
once right :)), debugging my app makes me run into your max transfer
limit. I doubt I'm making zillions of requests, but more than 70/hour
(due to the caching at app startup).

Can we work this out?

Thanks a lot in advance and keep up the good work :)

Jonathan

[Alex Payne]

Please email me off-list if you'd like to discuss being placed on the
whitelist. Thanks!

[spaz...@gmail.com]

Is there a method available to find out if you are following someone?
I know that I can get a list of my followers, and then pull their
status to find out, but that's two separate function calls. I'd like
to know if it's possible to have a <following> XML (or whatever) tag
added to the followers call, so I can see if I'm already reciprocating.

[Alex Payne]

Such an attribute is in the works. Thanks for the suggestion!

[spaz...@gmail.com]

Dare I ask when it might be available? A "soon" or "not so soon"
would be fine. =)

[Alex Payne]

Sooner than a month!

On 1/18/08, spaz...@gmail.com <spaz...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dare I ask when it might be available? A "soon" or "not so soon"
> would be fine. =)
>

[Terry Jones]

>>>>> "spazholio" == spazholio <spaz...@gmail.com> writes:
spazholio> Dare I ask when it might be available? A "soon" or "not so
spazholio> soon" would be fine. =)

This reminds me of a question asked of Boris Yeltsin, something like "How
are things in Russia?" or "How is the Russian economy?" (See google for
differing accounts).

Yeltsin replied "Good." Asked if he could expand, he said "Not good."

Terry