In a Keynote at Chirp by Ryan Sarver, Project Manager over the Twitter API, he announced a new, full API around live content streaming that just saved me thousands. The new API enables a real-time layer around not just Tweets and search that they’ve enabled in the past, but now direct messages, follows, favorites, and retweets. As users follow, direct message, or favorite, developers will now be able to pull these actions for each user in real time.
One of the biggest headaches of my own on SocialToo has been the need to constantly poll Twitter.com for new follows and unfollows. Each request requires an entire snapshot of the user’s friends and followers, and with Twitter’s current structure, can take minutes up to even a half hour or more to pull an entire snapshot of a user’s list of friends. This takes bandwidth, takes time, and costs money on both the developer’s servers and on Twitter’s end.
The new API will enable one request per follow, one request per DM, and the great thing about it is all of it happens as the user clicks “follow”, as the user sends the DM, and the User benefits from a real-time, live update on new follows and DMs on sites like SocialToo.com. So, assuming developers are given access soon, you will soon be able to have real-time updates on new followers and unfollowers, as well as new, filtered DMs on sites like SocialToo.com (if you haven’t signed up go sign up today!).
I’m excited for this new announcement, and it’s something I’ve been asking the Twitter API team for awhile now. It’s good to see Twitter finally getting the capacity to work on these requests. I hope to continue to see work on developers’ needs like this.
Stay N' Alive 
[…] Your Web Service Lets You Down – Sean P. Aune Twitter Announces Live Social Graph Streams – Jesse Stay Twitter Adds New Terms of Service to Its Developer Platform – Jesse Stay […]
I have observed that twitter is releasing new API and increasing their query limit. This is a good progress and allow developer to build richer application around twitter.
I have been reading some Social Networking Analysis (SNA) theories and applications. One of the concept in SNA is that we can identify information sources based on the frequency and quality of the conversation between the people in the network.
If we can extend the concept of social graph to identify “who” people converse the most, we can create a suggestion list based on the opinion leaders or information source from twitter.
There are definitely some interesting theory studies and courses that could
come out of all this.
Played around with the API today, it seems pretty straightforward and i just loved the “hover cards”. What blew me away was in_reply_to as well and the amount you can do to get threaded comments and visually be able to capture users tweets relevancy is just awesome.
Look forward to more tinkering!
I think R. Sarver's keynotes were the most important, and i'm sure you agree Jesse. I think he's right tho about pushing the envelope to see what we can actually accomplish..
Yes, Ryan's was by far the best. He's a great speaker.
Sounds win win!
I agree you Ahad.you are right that the keynotes of R.Server were really important.
[…] Your Web Service Lets You Down – Sean P. Aune Twitter Announces Live Social Graph Streams – Jesse Stay Twitter Adds New Terms of Service to Its Developer Platform – Jesse Stay […]