I think that the lag has more to do with twitter in general than anything else. I know that from time to time SMS updates take hours to go through. There is no apparent rhyme or reason to these delays, and sometimes they will delay for some users, and not to others. I would imagine that this delay would likewise affect the API.

I really like the idea of ‘push’ update via email; I wish there was a convenient way for twitter to directly support a ‘push’ interface. Something like the “twitter do” interface (www.twitter.com/tdo) would be really cool. It runs a URL when you send a DM to @tdo; you register your commands and everything; but it isn’t really useful for setting up you OWN bot, since it won’t respond to a DM to YOU.

The problem with the API is the 100 requests per hour; if you have thousands of users, you’re going to run out of requests in a hurry. Although in fairness, if you are running for 1000s of users, your server load is going to be pretty high using your emails anyway.

For users who don’t have direct access to procmail or similar (for example, lots of people on web hosts. If you have a CPanel web host, you can set up “email filters”, which when matched can “pipe to a program”, which will have the same effect.

FWIW, this should also work with languages other than Python, such as PHP, if people are more familiar with that. Although you’ll need to know more about your hosting environment, no reason C/C++ wouldn’t work, for that matter.

HTH

http://bilumi.org/trac/wiki/ce.....ndprocmail

I found the discussion here useful. Thanks.

It still seems like the best architecture is a polling scheme. The system can then interact with responses and status in addition to direct messages. One might be able to get whitelisted to reduce lag.

Anyone know of whitelisted apps? (I’m trying to gauge the liklihood of this happening with my app)

@Nathan they might do a batch process on the updates. Once a day run a sql query of all new events then send them off. Sounds silly but it’s notification not real-time like the API and the RSS feed – not 100% sure about the RSS but pretty sure.

Nice example & I agree with not having to use the twitter api. You could also use urllib and call the individual RSS user feed (eg: http://twitter.com/statuses/us...../12436.rss) reading the url periodically and parsing the RSS. The data is already structured and the tools exist to parse.