Friends list

[Richard]

I am trying to get a list of all of the friends of a user which is
fine for 100 friends since that is on the first page. However if the
user has lots of friends I have to do multiple requests and I am
concerned that twitter may block us for doing this.

For instance getting the friends of Robert Scoble requires about 180
requests:
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/scobleizer.xml
This is manageable the first time, though I still need to re-get this
to look for people who have been added to the list which currently
involves doing all these requests again.

Could I suggest a since parameter that just lists friends that have
been added or their picture or name has been changed since a
particular date. Also I guess there would need also to be a method for
listing friends that have been removed since a particular date.

Also knowing the number of friends or pages in the list in the first
result would aid getting pages in parallel.
--
Richard
friendbinder.com

[Barry Hess]

+1 for "friends since".  Would be useful if a user is "auto-following" another user for the purpose of sending automatic replies.

~Barry Hess

--
Barry Hess
http://blog.bjhess.com
http://www.scrawlers.com
http://getharvest.com

[Jesse Stay]

+1 here too - I've been forced to only run my auto-follow script once a day since I have some big A-listers on there.  Twitter would have much fewer API requests and server hits if they could enable this.

Jesse

--
Jesse Stay
The "Social" Geek

CEO, Founder, Consultant: Stay N' Alive Productions, LLC
Author: O'Reilly's FBML Essentials http://www.amazon.com/FBML-Essentials-Jesse-Stay/dp/0596519184/
Co-Author: I'm on Facebook -- Now What??? http://www.amazon.com/Im-Facebook-Now-What-Personal-Professional/dp/1600050956/

Blogger:

http://StayNAlive.com
http://OpensocialNow.com
http://FacebookAdvice.com

Phone: (801) 853-8339

[Alex Payne]

We'll support "since" for friends, sure. We can also hand-enable
auto-following for accounts that are bots or otherwise useful,
non-spammy services.

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

[Alex Popescu]

On Apr 29, 4:08 am, "Alex Payne" <a...@twitter.com> wrote:
> We'll support "since" for friends, sure.  We can also hand-enable
> auto-following for accounts that are bots or otherwise useful,
> non-spammy services.
>

Before supporting the since parameter a simpler solution might be to
return the friends in reversed chronological order (the latest added
being the first). This way API users will not have to pass through all
the friends pages, but rather stop at the first existing one.

Indeed since is a better option long term.

cheers,

./alex
--
.w( the_mindstorm )p.
Alexandru Popescu

> >http://www.amazon.com/Im-Facebook-Now-What-Personal-Professional/dp/1...

[Richard]

Either the since parameter or the sorting option by added date would
work for me.

--
Richard
friendbinder.com

[Richard]

I see this in "The next batch of API improvements has
arrived!" (http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/
browse_thread/thread/722b8cb5925563de)
[FIXED] /statuses/friends now support since and If-Modified-Since.
and this is in the documentation now, which I assume is the solution
to what we are talking about (thanks for the quick turn around!)

I can't get this to work however,
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/friendbinder.xml?since=Wed,+30+Apr+2008+12:41:00+GMT
should show an empty list but instead seems to show quite a few
friends and seems to repeat it's self

and
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/scobleizer.xml?since=Wed,+30+Apr+2008+12:41:00+GMT
is nothing but repeats of the same person (user id: 12)

--
Richard
@friendbinder

[Alex Payne]

I'll take a look at that possible bug. Thanks!

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

[Jesse Stay]

Alex - thanks a ton for implementing this.  This will reduce a huge strain in my development now, and reduce the requests I'm making back to Twitter now.

Jesse

--
Jesse Stay
The "Social" Geek

CEO, Founder, Consultant: Stay N' Alive Productions, LLC
Author: O'Reilly's FBML Essentials http://www.amazon.com/FBML-Essentials-Jesse-Stay/dp/0596519184/

Co-Author: I'm on Facebook -- Now What??? http://www.amazon.com/Im-Facebook-Now-What-Personal-Professional/dp/1600050956/

[Jesse Stay]

Is it possible to do the same thing for "followers", or at least order them so the most recent followers come first?

Thanks,

Jesse

[Alex Payne]

Should be!

[Jesse Stay]

Any idea when that will be enabled?  Right now if I do:

http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?page=1&lite=true&since=Thu%2C%2001%20Jan%201970%2000%3A33%3A28%20GMT

It returns null.

Thanks,

Jesse

[Alex Payne]

Hopefully deployed this coming Tuesday.

[Jesse Stay]

Just checking to see what the status was on this - was this deployed today?

Thanks!

Jesse

[Alex Payne]

No, we had some issues come up that took priority over this fix. Soon, though!

[Alex Popescu]

On May 15, 1:06 am, "Alex Payne" <a...@twitter.com> wrote:
> No, we had some issues come up that took priority over this fix.  Soon, though!
>

Thanks Alex. I would also like to point out the the implementation of
Friends API seems broken too and the 2 parameters (lite and page are
just ignored).

The following requests are returning the exact the same results:

curl -u <credentials> http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.json?page=1
curl -u <credentials> http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.json?page=3
curl -u <credentials> http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.json?page=1&lite=true
curl -u <credentials> http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.json?page=2&lite=true

[Adam Boettiger]

What's the best way to submit a feature request for upcoming builds?