Twitter People Search

[MikeP]

Does anyone know if it's possible to do a search to "Find People on
Twitter" using the current search API? It appears that you can search
for tweets from a person but that only yields one result at best. I
am looking to incorporate a functionality like Twitter itself has on
their site (Finding Twitter users) in a third party application. For
example, if I do a search on Twitter from "Live Nation", I get the
different Live Nation Tweeters. But it doesn't appear that I can do
this through the API. The only thing I can do through the advanced
search API is tweets from a person. Any ideas?

[Doug Williams]

Mike,
What criteria are you looking to use to identify interests? Words
tweeted, information in profile bios, user names?

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

[TjL]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Doug Williams <do...@twitter.com> wrote:
>
> Mike,
> What criteria are you looking to use to identify interests? Words
> tweeted, information in profile bios, user names?

I'd like to be able to find people who have "google.com" as their URL,
as it is currently a good indicator that the person is a "free iPhone"
spammer.

TjL

[MikeP]

I am not really looking to identify interests, I am looking to
identify user name. So if someone searches for a user name, they get
all the closely matching usernames returned. Exactly like the "Search
for People on Twitter" functionality on the site itself...any ideas?

On Mar 17, 7:23 am, Doug Williams <d...@twitter.com> wrote:
> Mike,
> What criteria are you looking to use to identify interests? Words
> tweeted, information in profile bios, user names?
>
> Doug Williams

> Twitter API Supporthttp://twitter.com/dougw

[sujamthe]

Hi,

I am also looking for the same as @MikeP

Want to offer the ability to find the twitter id of a user by their
full name from a web app. So, is there a way to do "find on twitter by
use name" similar to http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter
using an API call?

thanks,
Sudha

[Doug Williams]

Hi,
This service isn't currently offered in the API. For a number of
reasons, such as permitted username changes, account deletions, and
the like, this turns out to be a very tricky problem to solve on your
own.

How would you use this method? Since users still have to go through
the Twitter.com registration workflow, aren't they already given a
chance to fumble around and find an available username during the
process?

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

[sujamthe]

Doug,

We were thinking of using it to locate a friend to build a tweet
dynamically from our web client.

eg, to call out Doug Williams, we could allow the user to search and
find he is dougw on twitter and build a tweet calling out @dougw
directly from our tweet box.

Guess it has to wait for now.

Thanks,
Sudha

On Mar 17, 11:39 am, Doug Williams <d...@twitter.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> This service isn't currently offered in the API. For a number of
> reasons, such as permitted username changes, account deletions, and
> the like, this turns out to be a very tricky problem to solve on your
> own.
>
> How would you use this method? Since users still have to go through
> the Twitter.com registration workflow, aren't they already given a
> chance to fumble around and find an available username during the
> process?
>
> Doug Williams

> Twitter API Supporthttp://twitter.com/dougw

>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 2:26 PM, sujamthe <sujam...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
>
> > I am also looking for the same as @MikeP
>
> > Want to offer the ability to find the twitter id of a user by their
> > full name from a web app. So, is there a way to do "find on twitter by

> > use name" similar tohttp://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter