My app, in one of its parts, should reproduce the same behaviour as a web page, where you can find a section with a table of Twitter posts, I guess they are a user's timeline. I took a look at Twitter api's and I found a call which could return it, but, If I got it right, you are supposed to be authenticated with that user credentials. Is there a way to achieve it without being that user (thus without using that user's credentials)? If not we have to assume that web plugins have more flexibility than queries which return xml, or json? Which kind of approach fits best, considering the app needs to support iOS from 4.3 to 6.x? Does Twitter+Oauth provide more flexibility than direct Twitter api calls?
Hm, if you are looking to just display user's feed you can do it as simple as:
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=reMakeIn&count=200
Where you change the screen_name to the desired user that you want to show the feeds for.
No need what so ever to use authentication for this.
Not sure if this is what you want to achieve, but I use this approach to show random user's tweet feed.
Related
we are implementing stream in our application and so far we love the out of the box react components as well as the backend implementation stream ruby - this is our setup currently.
We are close to deploying a first MVP but found that it seems to be not possible to post activities to a flat feed from multiple users by default.
Our use case is that we have a group of people that want to post activities about a certain topic (think facebook groups). Therefore we create a feed for the object (lets say a company) and want each user to be able to post activities there. Our current workaround is to add the author id as additional data and add a custom header to a activity - obviously not the best solution as reactions won't work that way.
Looking around we found that this seems to not work out of the box see this issue and this question.
Is this a feature that is only available to paying customers or how can we activate it?
Thank you in advance!
When using Stream with React users can only post to their own user feed, this is a default permission policy that can be changed by Stream.
I suggest reaching to Stream support by email and ask to change the permission policy.
I am new to webOS development. I have one app in the app store and in the next update to the app I would like to be able to identify the age of users, their location, how long they use the app, which features they use the most/least and then store that data in a database. How do I do this? Many thanks in advance for your help.
Well, that's a pretty big question. Here's an outline of what to do, with some notes.
First, you're probably not going to be able to get age unless you ask the user directly and they tell you. Also, you're only going to get location if the application is location-aware and the user permits you to collect that data (when you install a location-aware application, it asks the user if they're okay with the fact that the application will be able to get their location).
As for how long they use the app and which features they use, that's easier. Depending on the granularity you need/want to capture, you can just record time stamps when a user starts and stops using a particular feature, such as when scene activate and deactivate methods fire. As long as you store feature name and timestamp, that should give you what you're looking for.
Then comes to question of collection. However you store it in the app, you have a couple of choices for how to get it out of the app. Unless you can get your users to just email the data to you, probably the easiest thing to do would be to create a web app (possibly with no user facing output, since you're just using it to collect data) using something like Google App Engine that gives you a URL you can send a POST request to using an HTTP request. Depending on how you set it up, it could do the request every time you collect a timestamp (bad for battery use, though), just occasionally, or only when the app is doing cleanup (possibly a problem if you don't get the request off in time).
I'd recommend taking a look online at how people do this type of thing in iPhone apps to get a good sense of how to do this type of thing. If you hit problems getting particular things to work, you can of course come here to StackOverflow with specific coding questions.
Basically, I want to use the Facebook Ads Manager Tool to estimate the number of users targeted by a particular set of targeting parameters. I know there is a published API available, but it is only usable if you are on their advertising application "whitelist." I am sure what I am asking is possible. Plus, it would be interesting to learn more about scraping.
Facebook's Ads Manager Tool is basically an AJAX UI for their ads API. In the process of creating a campaign, you can specify targeting parameters, and the page will dynamically report the number of users targeted as you modify the parameters. From what I've read on the web and here on stackOverflow, it is possible to use Firebug or a similar tool to pick apart what requests are being made by the page and to where, then mimicking these calls to get the information you want.
I'm having trouble interpreting the panels of Firebug. I think the URI I'm trying to send a request to is www.facebook.com/ajax/inventory_estimator.php, though I'm not sure how to form a call.
So, if I want to write a script or program that takes a list of words to use as keywords and returns the estimated number of users for each keyword, how could I do it?
Link to Facebook's Ads Manager Tool, Campaign Creation Page:
http://www.facebook.com/ads/create
yes using an extension like firebug to examine the HTTP requests is a good way to do this.
The Net tab is the one you want (last one).
Have you tried irobotsoft webscraper? It has a good ajax support.
Check their forum here: http://irobotsoft.org/bb/YaBB.pl
I'm using the twitter gem to build a Twitter bot in Ruby. I am trying to make it self-sustainable as it were, so I want it to generate its own content to tweet by scraping tweets of users outside its social circle (and then perhaps garbling them with Markov chain generator).
Which one is a better strategy?
Search for tweets via api
Load Twitter pages and scrape tweets with Hpricot or Nokogiri
Also, how can I try to ensure the base tweets come from outside my bot's followers' friends so it's harder to tell it's a bot?
At the moment I use a .yml file with tweets I generated by hand, which is far from ideal.
There's two questions here.
It's always better to use an API where one is available. This will future-proof you against the bot randomly breaking if a simple html element is changed, and it will also allow the website (ie, twitter) to rate limit your searches in case you put too high a load on the service. Although this is unlikely for twitter, it's good practice.
Sometimes, the information you want is unobtainable via the API. In this case, you should consider if you really need to scrape it, and if so, how to limit yourself to be polite.
Basically, if the API allows you to do what you want, use it for maintainability.
As for your second question, I do not have any experience with the twitter API. Is there a method to get twitter IDs of all your followers, and who they follow? If not, you'll be forced to scrape as earlier mentioned - if you really do need this information.
Once you have a list of those who your followers follow, you can check if the ID of the poster of what you want to repost falls inside this set.
Would you consider retweeting for this aspect of the bot?
One thing to also note is performance. If you were to scrape the website, you would have to download the entire page, then scrape the page(which is processor intensive as it is). As opposed to hitting the API, which would only return JSON/XML data.
So from strictly a performance standpoint, I would go with the API.
When you go to edit your favorite music or movies on Facebook, you will notice an autocomplete suggest list that is basically a list of "everything" (brand names, music artists, movies, etc.) How can someone consume that list in their own code? Is it part of the Facebook API?
They wrap some of the functionality in their FBML fields, but their developer wiki shows how they do what they do. If you want to consume their data though, you're going to have to play with an HTTP proxy and figure out what parameters to send to their server. There are also a couple parameters that seem to be session based, so I don't know how well you're going to be able to integrate this into your own application.
This was working for awhile, but now they require the session cookie, so we'll have to hope they add support for this to the graph api, unless you want to fight w/ the proxy.