Antipersona: Use Twitter from the perspective of another account | Hacker News Reader

Antipersona: Use Twitter from the perspective of another account

antipersona.co

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Architecture document @ Github: https://github.com/agermanidis/Antipersona/blob/master/ARCHI...

nice idea! but...

why do you need to ask for permission to:

- publish tweets

- update my profile

A sentence saying "we'll not publish anything" is not enough. Better dont ask for permission in the twitter API or explain why do you need it.

Probably because Twitter permissions granularity is very sparse. Last time I checked it was just read the whole account or read/write the whole account.

Thus, to create private lists on your account they need the permission to write.

What this probably does is enumerating the followings for the target user, then opening a filter stream [1] that watches a list of all of those.

[1] https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/reference/post/statuses/fi...

They actually use the lists/statuses endpoint, but it accomplishes essentially the same thing.

Their architecture is described here: https://github.com/agermanidis/Antipersona/blob/master/ARCHI...

Finally. I've been wanting to see this for ages. It surprises me Twitter does not have this option.

Apparently there was such a feature http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/26/now-you-can-see-twitter-the...

The rollout got stopped when a senior executive was following a porn star. I forget whether his wife actually saw that via this feature or whether he was simply just afraid of it happening, but the feature got cancelled.

Unfollow wasn't an option?

Tweetdeck used to have this feature, there was a "Home" option on the row at the bottom of the user profile modal. I was disappointed when it was removed, it was a super useful feature and worked on desktop!

If this app supports seeing the chosen user's public messages from their perspective, it'd be a great way to experience what it's like for certain high-profile accounts that get trolled and dogpiled all the time.

Neat!

I welcome people making applications such as these that show us just how public information is and how little we truly appreciate that fact (I assume many will find this creepy).

There's many areas to be concerned about regarding privacy in the 21st century, but not this.

> show us just how public information is

Information we choose to broadcast to the world on a platform designed for broadcasting to the world.

> find this creepy

Strangers can see my public list of who I follow, and can see the public posts of those people I follow. The people I follow can choose to make their posts not public if they wish, and I can choose to make my profile not public so that strangers can't see who I follow, if I wish. Not creepy, really.

The best way use case I can think of is to view my own feed anonymously. It’s all public information (whom I follow etc) so I should not need to be auth’d.

I think the problem here is that many people now use the practice to follow people and than mute them, so their tweets doesn't get shown in the feed (or he doesn't get notified if they like/retweet/comment them). So a person which officially follows millions of people could have muted them all and his feed is always empty. In my opinion is a good idea though.

Where's the demo or preview exactly? Do I have to install it on my iPhone to experience it first?

I think the GIF on the right is self explanatory.

I think it's brilliant. We too often look at things from our own bubble. The deeper the experience will be the better. It should not be limited to Twitter to be even more effective. Of course it can be used in a way that someone thinks privacy is harmed. I personally would feel honoured if someone took the time to look at the world trough my eyes! I would normally need to write a book for that to get that much braintime from a person.

Use twitter from someone else's perspective... modulo access to private accounts, and whatever filters they may have in their preferred client.

This is great and if lists are created on the user personal account, then they will be visible from the Twitter UI itself.

Too bad is a mobile app.

Eh, it probably doesn't hide the "disabled retweets", which can be a bit misleading. I doubt that's exposed to other users.

That is really clever! I did something similar in the past but I stopped at "simulating" the timeline with at most 200 followers.

I wonder if brands will use this to monitor what their competitors are doing. Maybe even stealing potential leads or clients.

Presumably this only works for public accounts.

This is a feature I always wanted from Twitter and the first time I regret not having an iPhone.

Downloaded the app and tried it. Links don't work, pictures don't show, there's no conversation view... This isn't becoming someone on Twitter, it's viewing a non-interactive and incomplete screenshot from over their shoulder. That makes it much, much less useful for its stated purpose. Too bad.

The fact that I think this is the worst idea in the world might be the very reason this could be huge. I thought friendster, myspace and facebook enabling people with 15min of fame by displaying their personal lives on the net was the worst idea in the world.

I did think the way Google handled search was the best idea in the world, so go figure.

It's all about you.

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