Tweet Contest logic ( Twitter )

Question

Disclaimer: I have no Twitter API experience nor have I used Twitter until today

I've been given the task of creating a 'tweeting contest' - if anyone has Twitter API experience and/or has done this in the past, I would appreciate any useful tips that you may have.

So the basic rules are that in order for a user to enter the contest, said user must follow the contest's twitter and must retweet with a specific message, such as 'just entered a contest for http://foo.com/contest '.

Questions:

1. To get the entrants, I have to parse the rss feed of the contest, http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/21586418.rss seems to only list the last few posts so I would probably have to interact with the Twitter API in order to get all messages. Can someone recommend documentation or a page that covers this?

2. I'm not exactly sure if I should store the actual users in a local xml file or rely on querying the Twitter API, if I store them I would have a cache local copy of users... a database would be overkill and if I were to store them it would be better off in an xml file, right?

3. Related to #1, should I actually parse for the exact message which the user has to tweet, eg "just entered a contest", the exact string when I parse through the data feed of all the tweets? Or is there some sort of tagging system I can use?

4. Related to #1, I would have to determine whether the user is a follower or not, so I can't determine that by parsing an entry/tweet, I would have to query the user's id and grab statistics from the people he/she follows?

Answer 1

You could search for the URL, but the best approach would be to use a hashtag :

just entered #supercoolcontest for http://foo.com/contest

You can search for incidences of #supercoolcontest which contain the required contest URL or whatever other keywords you might want. This will ensure users don't have to be text-precise when retweeting, and also gives people a way to talk about the contest in a general way that is trackable.

You can pull all tweets with a hashtag by using the search API :

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%23supercoolcontest

This is probably the most efficient approach, since you are guaranteed to only pull the tweets you're interested in, instead of n tweets from n users, only a tiny fraction of which has anything to do with you.

Every time you scrape that API feed (every n minutes), insert new unique users. I'd use a database - not hard or time consuming to stand something up with a table or two. Easier to query against later.

To answer your last question, you do need to make a separate API call to determine if a given user follows another user.

Answer 2

I know this is an old question and is probably not relevant to meder anymore, nonetheless I want to comment that now there is another way to solve this problem using Twitter's Streamming API http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api the advantage of this approach is that you are telling twitter to send all the tweets that accomplish some conditions right when they are generated.

With the search API you need to poll twitter for new tweets all the time and there is a bigger chance that some of them will be missing from the search results; meanwhile with the streaming API you keep an open connection to twitter and process the tweets as they come, Twitter won't guarantee that you will get all the tweets that meet the conditions, but from my experience the risk is much lower.