How I wrote a Twitter timeline search app in two days

blog.indextank.com

32 points·dbuthay··6 comments

I just tried your app but some of my tweets don't seem to be showing up. Does it have a lag or did it just miss them? Will they show up?

What you see on your timeline at the time you sign up is indexed right away. After that, the app gets all your tweets and those from who you follow. As twitter has an hourly limit for API calls, it may take some time to index your friends history.

It depends on how many friends you have and how much they tweet

Thanks, this is useful. I don't understand why Twitter itself doesn't provide this option. I can search for tweets near me, people, tweets with links, etc. but not what I missed when I wasn't online. Could you combine this with other services such as Facebook or email?

probably they didn't do it because it takes too many resources to have a separate index for every user.

I thought about adding Facebook status updates to the index. If people start asking for it, I'll consider doing it.

Are you saying that you can't understand why Twitter's services provide an incentive for you to be online all the time?

Good point, hadn't thought of that. I do wonder if proper search would affect people's time on Twitter. I don't find myself coming back for fear of missing out on something, but I do scroll down a lot when I visit. This must be expensive to them, as it causes lots of unnecessary db queries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com