Question about retweets

[Giorgos Eracleous]

Hey,

Great stuff with the API. I develop in Python with python-otter and I
have a question regarding the trackbacks. I am not sure I am looking
at the right places but it seems that there is no documentation for
the responses list elements. I cannot make sense of them except for
the trivial ones. You provide an explanation for trackbacks but I am
not sure I got it. Are trackbacks the retweets (if the type is tweet)
or am I missing something?

Thanks
George

[Vanessa Hsu]

George,

From our glossary, here's the definition of trackback:

On Topsy a trackback is a reference to a URL by an author. A tweet with an URL is a Twitter Trackback. This is slightly more expansive usage of the term compared to its original meaning. The Otter API provides the list of trackbacks for any URL that is in the Topsy index.

So the trackback would be any tweet with a URL in it, whether it's an original tweet or a retweet.

Regards,

Vanessa

[--]

Thanks for the clarification. In this case, how can I get the retweets for a specific tweet?

[Vanessa Hsu]

Giorgo-

Sorry - thought I'd replied to this already. For a specific tweet, you can call trackbacks with the specific tweet URL to get retweets:

http://topsy.com/twitter.com/nytimes/status/144936984241123328

or on our Otter API: http://otter.topsy.com/trackbacks.txt?url=http://twitter.com/nytimes/status/144936984241123328

-Vanessa

[--]

Excellent. Thanks a lot:)

[David Rees]

I agree with George, both that the API looks very nice and that some basic doc on the response attributes would be incredibly helpful.

I also have a couple followup questions in this same vein around search result attributes.

Is the trackback_total then for a tweet the same thing as # of retweets? Or does it include other types of references to that tweet?

And what do hits and score mean?

Thanks!
dave