Twitter Mutual Followers and Unfollows - A Quick Hack | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Mutual Followers and Unfollows - A Quick Hack

twitter.simontabor.com

31 pointssimontabor24 comments

Nice work! I actually created something very similar http://friendorfollow.com.

The hard part is dealing with Twitter's API rate limit and scaling. It's nearly impossible to pull down the data for large accounts like @aplusk. 5k id's at a time, pulled synchronously (due to Twitter's API paging system), by the time you're able to get all the data, he's already received 1k new followers.

That's my #1 Twitter tool... thanks for making it!

Thanks for saying so! Thanks for using it! :)

Love Friend or Follow. Use it every week!

Awesome! Thanks! I really appreciate it! :)

It seems to max out at 5000 followers (which makes some sense because the default behavior of the twitter API is to return the first 5000 ids)

This may seem nit-picky, but the main cool-factor of this is to see which high-profile people follow each other, which it almost works for.

Thanks for the feedback - Twitter does only return 5000 followers and following and I'll try to add support for high-profile people in the future. There is the issue of the 150 requests per hour limit that Twitter has per IP which means that it can't work on really big people without using a service like DataSift.

Have you actually read the DataSift TOS? I did, and it was completely unusable for what I wanted. (Last year, may have changed.) Basically if you payed them and extracted info you then couldn't make it publicly available. You also had to charge anyone you gave the information to. Which kinda makes sense, but rules out a lot of apps.

Hi Simon. The rate limiting is per Twitter credentials once authorized through OAuth, so you shouldn't have any issues there :)

Actually you are still rate limited when using OAuth credentials, it's just a higher rate.

If you can get users to log-in to your app and can then call the API with many different credentials it does help a lot tho.

I did a twitter hack at a recent hackday, and had massive problems with this. :-) http://jarofgreen.co.uk/2012/04/flocklight/ (It's Open Source if anyone wants to help)

Does DataSift have a service that returns up to date follower data? I thought they dealt only in Tweet streams.

I don't quite understand the point of this. What's the benefit? Isn't this the exact same thing as going through my Followers list on Twitter and looking at which ones don't have the blue "Following" button next to them (which would give me the more interesting metric, people whom follow me but I don't follow)?

Apologies - I do need to do the reverse but most people follow more people than follow them. And yeah it is the exact same thing as that, but you can search it and monitor who's unfollowed you since you last saved your list. You can also track/check other people so it's more useful than just looking for the blue following button - which I often find buggy

Does it have to have a point? Some of life's most wonderful things are completely pointless.

I made http://twollof.com some time ago, which also notifies UFs by mention if you want. :)

This is one of the many possible ways of viewing twitter followers.

http://www.justunfollow.com provides many other views:

1) Tweeps you're following but not following you back. 2) Tweeps following you but you're not following back. 3) Tweeps who recently unfollowed you. 4) Tweeps who recently followed you. 5) Tweeps you're following but haven't tweeted for the past 1 month. 6) All the tweeps you're following.

Hi, thanks for listing JustUnfollow. I made this about 2 years ago and we're 2 months away from hitting a million users... Last week we launched a native Android app and we'll soon be launching an iPhone app as well :)

Here's one I built some years ago: http://www.tweepsect.com/

What is the point of this? It was incorrect with the username I put in.

What username did you put in?

http://who.unfollowed.me/ another one

Is it open source ?

I'm planning on making all the projects on my site open source on GitHub but haven't got round to it yet, watch this space!

I was just going to ask to see the source. Pretty nifty. Liked the speed.

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