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Comment by ZitchDog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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