DISQUS

David · 10 months ago

828 calls doesn't sound like a very quick option as the API only allows 100 calls per hour.

Josh Bancroft · 10 months ago

Perhaps they use the user ID as the key because people can (and do) change their Twitter name/handle, which also changes their URL and anything else keyed off of that. For example, I could change my Twitter name from jabancroft to joshfromportland, and my new URL, http://twitter.com/joshfromportland would still contain all of my past tweets, I'd retain all of the people that I follow, and who follow me.

dave · 10 months ago

Interesting. Do people actually do that? All links to your tweets would break of course. Would you want that to happen?

Josh Bancroft · 10 months ago

My friend, @tersteeg, changed his Twitter name from @mediumtall. I don't know what happened to links to his old tweets. And could I now change my name to his old name and usurp his old tweet permalinks?Hmm... Now you've got me wondering. Time for some experimentation! :-)

neuraxon77 · 10 months ago

You are officially a number Dave. :)

People actually do change handles and it does break things (including trust and reputation). A number of times I've wondered who the heck I was following was before realizing they may have changed their handle.

jaxn · 10 months ago

Our mutual friend Rex did this a while back. I think he was initially rhammock and then just changed it to r when people noticed that one letter usernames were possible.

Edward Vielmetti · 10 months ago

Dave, I've changed my twitter name (from @edwardvielmetti to @vielmetti) because it made it more possible to have people type in the handle in finite time. It would have been a real drag to start over again from zero.

Nikolay Kolev · 10 months ago

Twitter decided to save themselves a join and make our lives miserable.

Jeff DiStanlo · 10 months ago

just thinking out loud. i wonder if this is just the first step in implementing groups at twitter. wonder if there will eventually be a second array in parallel to this indicating which group that follower belongs to. maybe this was just a baby step to something bigger?

Joe Knapp · 10 months ago

Doesn't the API already have calls to get the twitter names for followers/friends?

e.g.,

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.json?page=N

There are 100 friends per page, so the thing to do would be to first get the user info:

http://twitter.com/users/show/USERNAME.json

From that extract the number of friends which gives the number of pages to fetch. The returned JSON or XML structure contains the numeric ids as well as the screen names.

The social graph expands so rapidly though that whitelisting would be necessary to go very far. I asked for whitelisting, not expecting a positive response really, and got this:

<quote>
Thanks for requesting to be on Twitter's API whitelist.
Unfortunately, we've rejected your request.

Here's why:

Apologies, but we don't have the resources to handle research projects on social graphs. Our Data Mining Feed is available if you'd like to study the content of statuses on our service.
</quote>

The data mining feed is evidently a random sample of 600 status updates each minute. Not sure what that's good for exactly, but must be something! Maybe looking for emergent memes, since that's a fair sample of the twitter daily traffic.

Herve · 10 months ago

Dave, I just came thru the scenario where it MAKES sense to follow numeric IDs, and not mnemonic: I've changed my mnemonic from hkabla to HerveKabla. Didn't change a lot from the follower/following perspctive, but it all contributed to a big application mess, from thwirl to twitterfeed up to twitterfon: none of them uses the IDs...