Since the announcement of the Twitter-Gnip partnership, there have been lots of news stories and blog posts stating that this is the end of the independent developer, because there is no more free Twitter data. This is completely wrong. You can get all the Twitter data you need, as long as you don’t want *all* [...]
Twitter Developers
Read all the tweets from the Twitter engineers
Get behind the scenes with this real-time display of all the Twitter engineering team tweets. Learn about bugs and new features fast.
It may be my age, but I’m confused when I read that Twitter is somehow evil by acting competitively towards their developers, or that there is no future in being a Twitter developer. I think what they mean is that Twitter is becoming increasingly competitive with developers who try to replace Twitter.com. But isn’t that [...]
The smartest thing Twitter ever did was externalize their data through an API. It created an active third party community that supported Twitter when times were tough and they didn’t have the resources to develop clients for all the platforms that needed them. That developer community was based on the Web 2.0 business model, which [...]
I’ve been thinking about how to prepare the tweet aggregation code used for the dev tweets page. I know that I want to add multiple modules to the system, and make it easy to customize the appearance of the tweet list. This sounds a lot like the WordPress model with plugins and themes, so I’m [...]
I finally finished the last tweaks to the JS file. Doing Ajax from within a JS file HTML loaded by a plugin requires some interesting adjustments. I didn’t want to hard code the Ajax calls, so I had to capture the current URL of the plugin directory and save that in a hidden div within [...]
I have a couple of thousand tweets from Twitter’s engineering team in the database now, so I can move on to the display code. While I’m building this tweet aggregation system, I’m cleaning up the code so I can open source it. I’ve been writing variations on this type of system for almost two years, [...]
I’m a real data junkie, so what I love best about any tweet aggregation database are the insights you can gain with a few simple SQL statements. When I aggregate tweets, I maintain a user table that collects the account information delivered with each tweet by the streaming API. This is invaluable later on for [...]
One of the first things you need to look at when building a tweet aggregator for a set of keywords or group of users is how fast and varied the flow is. This will tell you if the resulting tweet stream will be interesting to read and valuable at a later date. I collected the [...]
I found what appears to be a list of everyone at Twitter. I’m going to add only those who are involved in development to the aggregation list. The number of employees is bound to grow explosively in the next year, so this limitation is needed to keep the aggregated tweets focused on technical issues.
Twitter has a really open development process with the devs using their Twitter accounts freely to discuss their work. I’m going to aggregate their accounts and display them on the site. The display app isn’t in place yet, but it will soon appear here. I’ll also publish the list of accounts being followed. Building this [...]
