

How (And Why) I'm Circumventing Twitter's API Instead of Using It - livestyle
http://pandawhale.com/convo/7179/how-and-why-im-circumventing-twitters-api-instead-of-using-it

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desbest
Why are third parties important in the Twitter ecosystem?

Let Twitterrific count the ways:

First use of “tweet” to describe an update (see page 86 of Dom Sagolla’s
book.) First use of a bird icon. First native client on Macintosh. First
character counter as you type. First to support replies and conversations (in
collaboration with Twitter engineering.) First native client on iPhone. And
more.

<http://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/>

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juniorplenty
Expanded for ecosystem firsts beyond Twitterrific:

[http://blog.140proof.com/post/30593225507/twitter-
features-i...](http://blog.140proof.com/post/30593225507/twitter-features-
invented-by-the-ecosystem)

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vizzah
PhantomJS is great for scrapping, but the proposed solution can still be
easily recognized as a bot behaviour. Twitter can easily block it for
excessive page loads, for example serving CAPTCHA the same way Google does to
prevent search scrappers. I can't see how this solution would be more solid
and future-proof.

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zapt02
Completely right. A lot of social sites, notably Facebook do this when you for
example post bit.ly links, so users are already groomed to accept it.

Then again, you could buy external captcha solving services and keep on
trucking. :)

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annon
I'm sure it will work great, until they alter their page layout ever so
slightly. Change an id here or there. Then you have to scramble to fix for the
new layout while your 'API' is down.

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benregenspan
Needless to say, this is an awful idea for anything besides a small personal
project. PhantomJS or no, it's easy to detect this behavior, and also easy to
understand why Twitter would be against it.

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desbest
Twitter has been around for its first 5 years without putting a single advert
on their site, and only NOW they want to make profits after realising the
third party developers are hosting Twitter based content elsewhere with mobile
client apps?

That is a totally bad business decision from the start if you ask me.

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jimminy
You've not seen the Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets in Search, that have
been there for nearly 2 years. They've been profitable, on a monthly basis for
a while.

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jdotjdot89
A big problem with this is from my own experiences, despite the rate limiting
on the API, it has far more access to historical data (eg, past tweets) than
the browser.

