Items tagged twitter in 2012
Filters: Year: 2012 × twitter × Sorted by date
Is Twitter using its public api for its own website?
You can use Firebug or the Chrome network inspector to answer this question for yourself. They used to use the API for pretty much all of the site, but I think they’re backing off that a little know heat they serve real pages with real URLs for things like individual profile pages.
[... 68 words]What are the ways to get your links expand in Twitter inline?
This feature is called Twitter Cards - you need to add some metadata to your pages, then apply to Twitter for inclusion in the program (they currently operate a whitelist of sites). See the documentation for more details.
[... 57 words]How does Twitter select trending topics?
They use stream processing algorithms—they mention trending topics calculation in their technical blog entry about Storm, their open source stream processing software: http://engineering.twitter.com/2...
[... 38 words]What is the most efficient way to lookup an object (e.g. a user) by only a string?
Yes—an index on a varchar column is exactly how you would implement this.
[... 38 words]Why does Twitter use a hashbang instead of using the History API?
I asked a friend who is an engineer there about this a while ago. When they shipped the first version of Twitter that used fully Ajax driven pages there was a critical bug with pushState in a widely deployed version of Safari, which made it impractical to commit to.
[... 67 words]Why did Twitter have so many problems if it is made with Ruby?
The technical problem Twitter solves (distributing millions of short messages per minute to an enormous graph of follow relationships) is extremely hard in any language.
[... 44 words]Do Twitter API limits rest at the top of the hour or is it floating?
I’m pretty sure they are calculated from the time of the first hit you make to the API—resetting on the hour would likely encourage API users to run large batches of queries at 1 second past the hour, resulting in huge and unwanted traffic spikes.
[... 68 words]What is a Twitter alternative for internal teams?
Yammer is the most obvious tool here.
[... 78 words]How to get a Twitter user’s join date?
It’s included in the standard user JSON that comes back with any tweet—or you can hit http://api.twitter.com/1/users/s... and look at the created_at key
[... 40 words]