Twitterrific
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 23 Nov 2017 16:50:01 GMT
I recently started using Twitterrific, a Mac and iOS Twitter client. I like that it syncs between my iMac and iPhone, and its "Delete and Edit Tweet" feature, something that I occasionally do by hand in Twitter's interfaces, to fix a typo. But I'm missing a few features:
- Link previews.
I follow some accounts that link to meme images, and seeing at least part of the image before clicking on it is handy. - List retweeters of a Tweet. Twitterriffic shows a retweet count, but, unlike Twitter's clients, has no way to show the list of people who retweeted.
- List likers of a Tweet.
Again, Twitterrific shows a like count, but has no way to show the list of likers.
I tweeted about the second and third issues above, and received this reply:
There are no APIs available from Twitter for this unfortunately. Must all be built from scratch.
— Twitterrific (@Twitterrific) November 23, 2017
I can find no API for listing who likes a post, but there is definitely an API for reposters.
The examples below use twurl, Twitter's curl-like command line tool, that sends raw URLs to the Twitter API, does all the OATH validation for you, and returns the raw JSON.
First, show a recent Tweet from President Trump (long lines elided):
$ twurl '/1.1/statuses/show.json?id=933692459351265280&trim_user=1&include_entities=0'
{"created_at":"Thu Nov 23 13:43:24 +0000 2017",
"id":933692459351265280,
"id_str":"933692459351265280",
"text":"Will be doing a live Thanksgiving Video Teleconference with Members of the Military...",
"truncated":true,
"source":"\u003ca href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/download\/iphone\" ...",
"in_reply_to_status_id":933662564587855877,
"in_reply_to_status_id_str":"933662564587855877",
"in_reply_to_user_id":25073877,
"in_reply_to_user_id_str":"25073877",
"in_reply_to_screen_name":"realDonaldTrump",
"user":{"id":25073877,"id_str":"25073877"},
"geo":null,
"coordinates":null,
"place":null,
"contributors":null,
"is_quote_status":false,
"retweet_count":5122,
"favorite_count":28375,
"favorited":false,
"retweeted":false,
"lang":"en"
}
Look up the retweeters, limited to 5. The default, and maximum, is 100, though you can use a 'cursor' to fetch additional pages of 100.
$ twurl '/1.1/statuses/retweeters/ids.json?id=933692459351265280&count=5'
{"ids":[742479627592052736,2209081703,140410587,848195164673855490,3854255787],
"next_cursor":0,
"next_cursor_str":"0",
"previous_cursor":0,
"previous_cursor_str":"0"
}
Lookup details on one of those user IDs:
$ twurl '/1.1/users/lookup.json?user_id=140410587&include_entities=0'
[{"id":140410587,
"id_str":"140410587",
"name":"Trump supporter",
"screen_name":"EdMendez1969",
"location":"",
"description":"El comunismo no debe existir en el planeta...",
...
}]
I don't know why Twitter has no API to fetch the users who liked a post (which are called "favorites" in the API docs). You can get the posts liked by a user, but not the users who like a post. Unless you screen-scrape the web UI, which is fraught with peril, and no fun.
I hope this post will encourge the Twitterrific people to add to their clients the ability to show retweeters for a post.
