Comments on: Announcing Followerlap

By: Terence Eden

Terence Eden — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:37:44 +0000

I did something similar earlier this year – Worth Retweeting. Enter your name and the name of the person you’re retweeting and you’ll see how many of your followers you’ll annoy.

I wrote it up in May this year with code examples if anyone wants them – http://shkspr.mobi/blog/index.php/2009/05/worth-retweeting/

By: web page designer

web page designer — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:46:17 +0000

I had to do this in the past too for a twitter app I created, except I was doing the opposite. If I remember correctly, I think the twitter API returns an array of IDs for all the users… then you can just put those into your own two arrays, and do some array math for whatever you’re trying to accomplish. Should only end up being a couple lines of code after the API requests are made.

Cool little app, I love simple but useful sites like that :)

By: Bruno Bergher

Bruno Bergher — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:28:40 +0000

Eric, perhaps you could leave the option of cross referencing the two lists via JavaScript.

I mean: you run the core of it on the server, then print a hidden list of the overlapping user IDs. Then, if the browser supports JS, add a button which runs the queries based on the IDs on the client side, so they don’t use up your API limit.

Maybe there’s something to it I’m not seeing, but would probably be a pretty simple solution to actually SEEING who’s in the overlap.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:32:45 +0000

According to the Twitter signup form, periods aren't allowed, Aklap; only letters, numbers, and underscores. Can you point me to a username containing a period?

By: Aklap

Aklap — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:14:16 +0000

Periods are legal characters in Twitter names, but your site chokes on them.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:15:53 +0000

What does the @god & @devil comparison tell us? and then again what does it tell us when we compare these?

By: Jonathan Knoll

Jonathan Knoll — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:46:58 +0000

Eric, That's actually what I suspected you meant, except that I was trying to find an explanation for why the rate-limit is so high. This is very weird. I just went to: http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml, and it gave me 20000 (I'm whitelisted). My wife tried at her office, and it gave her 150. Could your app, perhaps, be hosted on a domain that has "uber"-whitelisting? (Not something mentioned in the API dox. :p) Dunno. Lucky you. ~ @yoni

By: saleiva

saleiva — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:06:24 +0000

Hey Eric,

I’m really like your idea on followerlap.
I’ve some design ideas for it. If you would be interested in it, please let me know!

Congrats and regards.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:58:31 +0000

Apparently I was unclear, Jonathan. What I meant is that Followerlap has a "debug mode", which is invoked with a URL parameter. It's the same tool doing the same stuff, just outputting values for me to see (or triggering failure states based on values given to said parameter). Here: compare God and the Devil, with the details.

By: Jonathan Knoll

Jonathan Knoll — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:45:51 +0000

Eric, I know that, by the rules, Damon is correct about the API limits: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Rate-limiting. Have you outputted the rate-limit when *not* in debug mode? In fact, where did you find out about debug mode? And are you sure the TOS allow you to use it like that? ~ @yoni

By: Dougal Campbell

Dougal Campbell — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:37:49 +0000

There have been many calls for API methods to return all the follower/friend names in one fell swoop. The problem is that the way that the Twitter datastore is structured, it’s a very expensive operation on the Twitter server-side. So it ain’t going to happen any time soon, according to what their API guys have said.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:19:52 +0000

Damon: nope. account/rate_limit_Status returns an hourly-limit value of 100000 when I run the tool in "debug" mode (which, among other things, shows me a var_dump of account/rate_limit_Status). I'm not signing in as me, either, so it must be IP-bound.

By: Damon

Damon — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:07:32 +0000

Eric: Did Twitter bump it up for you or something? On my whitelisted boxes, the hourly rate limit is only 20,000 hits. Without whitelisting it’s 150.

By: Brian Deterling

Brian Deterling — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:01:46 +0000

Tweepdiff (http://tweepdiff.com) does essentially the same thing. It shows three lists: one for in common and one for unique to each user being compared. It also lets you compare more than 2 users and you can mix and match followers/friends. As mentioned in previous comments, the API tends to fall over when you get above a certain number of friends/followers but I doubt people really want an accurate comparison of 200k followers anyway. I use memcache and a combination of the followers and statuses APIs which works ok with pagination. And yes, I too wrote the tool without checking to see if someone else had already done it, and was happy I got the experience.

Brian

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:43:31 +0000

Dougal: For what I'm doing, I haven't had to register because the API limit isn't really an issue: the default hourly limit for an IP address seems to be 100,000 hits, and since each comparison requires two hits that's 50,000 comparisons an hour, or 13.889 comparisons per second. No problem. Even if I set up a tool to show (or integrate into Followerlap) friend-overlap statistics, that will double my API hits and halve my upper bound to 6.944 comparisons per second. I think I can handle that. The key there, of course, is to just present the numbers and not try to build a list of details. What I really wish is that the API had followers/usernames and friends/usernames methods. Then I could at least list and link to them all, even if I didn't have avatars or bios or whatever. That'd be pretty cool.