Twitter. Receive instant messages from users on your website.
I was browsing the Stocktwits.com site. When registering, I provided them with my Twitter username. Now when I tweet, and if my tweet contains a $ symbol and a stock ticker symbol, it instantly appears on Stocktwits.com
I am interested in implementing something like this on my website. I just wanted to understand how it would work. This is how I assume it will work at a high level:
1) My website requires users to provide their Twitter usernames 2) Run a cron job every few minutes to pull the latest tweets for each of the usernames provided via http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ username.xml
I've tried Stocktwits and they update almost instantly - so it doesn't look like they check for updates every few minutes.
- What are the best ways to implement this solution? Thanks to
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They are probably using the Twitter search API to look up the $ sign. After that, if they want to show tweets only from their users, all they have to do is filter what they show with the help of its user database.
If you don't want to run searches every few minutes, you can use the Twitter Streaming API .
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