Adam Green
Twitter API Consultant
adam@140dev.com
781-879-2960
@140dev

The Phirehose library needs some beta testers

December 5, 2013

I’m not the author of the Phirehose library for streaming API connections. I just use it as the network layer of my streaming API code. I don’t have the network coding skills to write this library’s code or to fix it, but I can encourage anyone using Phirehose or my 140dev Twitter framework code to […]

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Building a production version of the 140dev streaming API framework

December 4, 2013

When I built the 140dev framework 3 years ago, my goal was to provide a set of training wheels. Coders who were new to the API could get a complete working system in miniature. My emphasis was on simplicity, certainly not production level functionality. Since the Twitter IPO and the $200M acquisition of Topsy, collecting […]

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Is Apple’s Purchase of Topsy a Social TV Play?

December 3, 2013

I’ve read lots of commentary on the Topsy purchase by Apple. I like TechCrunch‘s pointer to Topsy’s patents as just part of the puzzle. What nobody seems to be mentioning is that this is a smart and relatively cheap way for Apple to buy a huge tweet store that they can display on their own […]

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Social TV is the next wave

December 3, 2013

Every time I get my hair cut, my barber asks the same question, “What’s the next big thing?” What he means is when is the economy going to boom again over some new technology. Living and working in Lexington, Mass., which straddles Route 128′s hottest tech segment makes everyone in my town tech dependent, or […]

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Search API: Are search results filtered for user quality?

November 29, 2013

A continual question on the Twitter developer mailing list is why certain tweets and even entire accounts don’t show up in search results. The standard answer is that the search API filters out tweets that don’t meet a minimum quality threshold. That makes a lot of sense, and should definitely be done, if it returns […]

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Engagement Programming: Best practices for collecting user account info

November 29, 2013

The Twitter API provides two requests for user account info: users/show and users/lookup. On the surface the difference between the two seems obvious. Users/lookup returns data on 100 accounts at a time, while users/show only delivers a single user. The Twitter docs make the correct suggestion that users/lookup is best suited for gathering the account […]

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Search API: More secret search operators

November 26, 2013

Last week I pointed out the undocumented search operator min_retweets. I’ve been searching tweets about this operator (yes, that is pretty meta) and found two more operators that aren’t in the official docs: min_replies and min_faves. You’ll have to experiment with these to see which are best for different needs. Before we get into the […]

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Search API: What are the real limits on tweet results?

November 25, 2013

A common question asked by potential clients is how many tweets they can expect to get from the search API. Although I have been telling them “1,500 tweets up to 7 days old” for years, I decided to confirm that. To my surprise, the limit is no longer provided in the official docs. I tried […]

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Engagement Programming: Super simple rate limit programming

November 25, 2013

Rate limits are a constant concern when doing engagement programming with the REST API. I’ve settled on an incremental approach. Instead of building a rate accounting infrastructure that measures the remaining requests for each API call, I find it easier to write scripts that break high-usage tasks into manageable chunks that won’t exceed the limits. […]

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Why are Twitter API limits kept a secret?

November 23, 2013

Twitter has always been vague when it comes to limits in the API. The search API is a good example. Until version 1.1 the search API had rate limits, but they were never revealed in the docs or by dev support staff. The most we were able to extract were statements about there being enough […]

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Engagement Programming: Leaders will point to your engagement targets

November 22, 2013

In yesterday’s post I recommended searching for the screen names of influential accounts as a way of getting high-quality leads for engagement. A related approach is to collect the timelines of key accounts, and extract the people they @mention. This is a good way to find the cool crowd in any subject area. If a […]

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Search Programming: Secret query operator min_retweets

November 22, 2013

Twitter search has been steadily improving since it was acquired from Summize in 2008. At first it returned tweets in a different format from the rest of the API, and had other integration problems, but Twitter has been working on it steadily. I’m writing a book on search API programming, and the first step is […]

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