

Ask HN: community-based alternative Twitter API - kierdavis

Here's an idea to get around Twitter's admittedly crap api: people install a bookmarklet, browser extension etc. that detects when you are reading Twitter, and extracts the tweets from the DOM and sends them to a server. If enough people use it then you can start to build up a relatively good alternative to Twitter's unreliable and heavily rate-limited API. Does anyone know if this would work effectively, and more importantly would it breach Twitter's TOS?
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seanlinehan
We would need an absurdly diverse and large group of people for this to be
effective on a large scale. If it was just the hacker/designer community
working on collecting data then we could potentially have a great amount of
data for those specific niches and perhaps a bit of data for random other
niches.

Building the plugin itself would not be too challenging, but it would require
"fixing" every time Twitter changes any little thing in their layout.

I think I much prefer the idea of having a massive botnet, each node with its
own API keys, querying their own subsection of Twitter to build one database.
In the spirit of collaboration, it could be possible to write a program that
would carry out all of these tasks in a distributed manner on each person's
individual computer. If you have one source of accounts + api keys + proxies
that were auto distributed to each node you could keep each machine working.

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livestyle
Have you seen this? [http://pandawhale.com/convo/7179/how-and-why-im-
circumventin...](http://pandawhale.com/convo/7179/how-and-why-im-
circumventing-twitters-api-instead-of-using-it)

