

Twitter Chokes Off Meerkat’s Access to Its Social Network - byoogle
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/twitter-chokes-off-meerkats-access-to-its-social-graph

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kelvintran
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.)

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AznHisoka
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.

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asanwal
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.

