Twitter Threaded Conversation

Question

I've been wanting to create something like this: http://twitter.theinfo.org/

A script which finds replies to a tweet and shows them in a threaded fashion like this:

http://twitter.theinfo.org/45967981225840640

Any help on where to start or if there's an implementation already out there for me to tinker with?

Incidentally, I've added a bounty to a similar question about threading tweets here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3552646/whats-a-good-set-of-heuristics-for-threading-tweets — Mark Longair, Mar 25 '11 at 17:12

score 9 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 12 '11 at 05:02

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Going up the thread is easy because replies have in_reply_to_statu_id but finding replies to a status is near impossible. You have have to maintain a search looking for tweets to a specific user and check if they are a reply in which case save them.

answered Mar 12 '11 at 05:02

abraham

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+1 See [this FAQ entry](http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_faq#replies) for more info (well, not really *more* info, but at least confirmation that this is correct). – Michelle Tilley Mar 21 '11 at 03:08

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 21 '11 at 19:53

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What I would do if i had to do that, is run a cron that would store the in_reply_to_status_id field, and then query that.

You could theoretically expect that only his followers will reply to him, if you'd like a starting point

answered Mar 21 '11 at 19:53

Pedro

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 23 '11 at 00:08

You can use the Twitter OAuth API in numerous languages however what type of data you can get is limited to the API calls they provide.

What you're probably looking for is something like their retweets call; http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/statuses/retweets/:id

You may want to take a look at the Twitter API Wiki; http://apiwiki.twitter.com/w/page/22554648/FrontPage

as well as their Tutorials listing;
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/w/page/22554678/Tutorials

Twitter Threaded Conversation

3 Answers3