Twitter Chokes Off Meerkat’s Access to Its Social Network

buzzfeed.com

12 points·byoogle··4 comments

I've never used the Twitter API or Meerkat, but it seems that the 'choke' could be bypassed by scraping followers/following info from the publicly accessible profile pages of users.

Eg, sign on to Meerkat via Twitter, get username, scrape user's Twitter profile page for connected users, check if these connected users are on Meerkat, ask the user which of them he/she wants to connect with on Meerkat, then add on Meerkat.

Am I missing something? (I'm sure I am.)

The army of lawyers headed your way? How about the CFAA for 'unauthorized access' to Twitter?

When Twitter has all the money and lawyers it's sure tough to argue.

You can't scrape a Twitter profile page for followers/following, you need to be signed on, and you'll encounter rate limits scraping even if you somehow do this with an authenticated session.

Now if you were talking about scraping Twitter user profiles, that's much easier since Twitter allows anonymous access to those. But not followers/following - they removed that around 2012 or so.

Twitter just bought Periscope which is a Meerkat competitor for just under $100 million.

Meerkat was being talked about as this year's breakout SxSW startup so choking off access right before shows Twitter isn't messing around.

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