Simon Willison’s Weblog

Is there a way of tracking shortened URLs with Twitter streaming API?

21st January 2011

My answer to Is there a way of tracking shortened URLs with Twitter streaming API? on Quora

Think about it like this: the whole point of the Twitter streaming API is to get you the tweets as soon after they are posted as possible. If the API were to provide access to the lengthened URLs, it would have to delay emitting a Tweet on to the stream until a resolver had gone through each shortened URL in the tweet and checked to find what it redirects to. This would mean that the speed with which the streaming API could deal out tweets would be dependent on the speed of the third party servers that serve up the redirects. I doubt Twitter would ever want to implement this.

I believe the Twitter search API may provide an index of the lengthened version of short URLs (the search on Twitter.com quietly started doing that a month or so ago).