Few API feature additions

[Aditya]

These are of course, up for discussion, and I'd like to know what
others think:

1) The `source` field in an API call contains HTML (a link to the
source). Logic says it makes things easier to implement, since we just
need to directly print whatever is the text content. However,
shouldn't it actually be two fields – one which contains the name of
the source, and the other the actual link to it? Not everybody likes
to link to competing apps :)

2) The `in_reply_to_status_id` is great, and really helps make sense
of conversations. But not everybody uses it, which makes Twitter try
and 'guess', and it is usually wrong. That makes for some really odd
contexts sometimes.

One thing Twitter could do is automatically prepend the @name when it
sees an app setting the parameter, and not otherwise. I realise that
it'll take people some time to get used to this, and app will have to
implement it. It was just rattling around in my head and I thought I'd
throw it out here to get some inputs.

[Cameron Kaiser]

> 1) The `source` field in an API call contains HTML (a link to the
> source). Logic says it makes things easier to implement, since we just
> need to directly print whatever is the text content. However,

> shouldn't it actually be two fields _ one which contains the name of

> the source, and the other the actual link to it? Not everybody likes
> to link to competing apps :)

Then don't print them :) Seriously, if you really don't want to print the
HTML, a simple regex to drop the tags would suffice.

> 2) The `in_reply_to_status_id` is great, and really helps make sense
> of conversations. But not everybody uses it, which makes Twitter try
> and 'guess', and it is usually wrong. That makes for some really odd
> contexts sometimes.
>
> One thing Twitter could do is automatically prepend the @name when it
> sees an app setting the parameter, and not otherwise. I realise that
> it'll take people some time to get used to this, and app will have to
> implement it. It was just rattling around in my head and I thought I'd
> throw it out here to get some inputs.

The other problem is that it would be an unexpected 'penalty' on tweet
length, and could frustrate people who don't understand what's going on.
Also, are there really that many apps that let someone make a reply to
a specific tweet that *doesn't* start with @?

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Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * cka...@floodgap.com
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