Ever wanted to download followers from somebody’s Twitter account in a basic list format? I recently made one that does just that. Its pretty easy to use too (has some jQuery to have a better interface).
Note: This is just a quick version of the script, not really tested in secure environments or anything. Expect the script to break if you don’t type in a real screen name, watch your API call limits, or if you don’t have a valid authentication login.
Instructions
Download, Extract, Upload to Web Server
Edit get.php (username and password)
http://path.to/script
Type in a valid screen name and you’re good to go
There are limitations to this such as the Twitter API calling limit. You can only follow so many people before the script breaks unless your IP or account is whitelisted. You might think..well okay the API call limit per hour is 150, that means I can search 150 screen names in 1 hour, that’s not bad at all. WRONG. The program can only grab 100 followers per call, so say I wanted to grab an account with 1000 followers, it will take 10 API calls to grab all 1000 followers. If you wanted to grab 10 accounts with 1000 followers…well you can do the math. 15 Accounts per hour with that situation is inefficient. Getting an account whitelisted can help ya overcome that limit.
For a more professional version of this script with more features, contact me and I will give you a quote. It’s good having such a feature on your site, it’ll help you market your business or website better with millions of twitter accounts recorded on your database.
How does a web developer have any use of Twitter? Well one you have the potential of finding people with similar coding styles, two you could gain knowledge on a daily basis by following thousands of people, or three you could market yourself to either obtain a job or find business for your freelance/independent work. Knowing how to use the Twitter API also helps in increasing your work. Take a look at (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia)’s website owned by FX.
They completely dominated their site with Twitter. Is it a good thing? Of course it is! Think about it, user feed back increases which means more people are going back to their site for videos, pictures, and exclusive content. Because Twitter is real-time they took the advantage of the example of a real-time stock ticker and transformed it into a real-time Twitter ticker. One of many ways to make Twitter unique.
To the point…Twitter is a business companion and also an advantage for web developers. Knowing how to utilize the Twitter API and also knowing the business advantages of using Twitter for marketing purposes is a enormous plus for your resume and a great way to attract clients (for you web freelancers out there). But remember, if your going into marketing, you need to know all the aspects of social media to really be “hip” in today’s trends. Customers want to relate to something, don’t be Twitter only because there’s a large statistic somewhere stating X amount of people have no idea what the hell Twitter is. Just take advantage of Twitter in most of its many corners.
Future
Everyone that’s computer savvy knows about Twitter now so what does that mean 5, 10, or 15 years down the road. Will there be a company that will buy out Twitter or will Twitter be the centralization of all real-time social data? My blog (http://mattloinfo.com/) already is using Twitter to bridge real-time contacting to my phone. CNN is using the Twitter to communicate with its viewers and at the same time informing the public. Iran recently used Twitter to voice their opinion in a dictatorship nation. So what’s the future of Twitter? In my perspective, its going to turn into what we saw happen with the .com and internet shopping. Stock up on ideas and names because down the road, everyone will know Twitter and it will be a custom to life. Facebook is already the best site to communicate between friends and family. Because Twitter is more public, it will lag in its popularity due to the factor of openness and lack of “pretty features.” Applications already tie Twitpick, Twitter, and other applications but it’s still easier using Facebook. So how will Twitter progress to the younger non tech savvy crowd? Time. Celebrities, news, weather, and friends will make Twitter be a foundation Web 3.0 and a reality for all communicative devices. So again, if you have ideas in how to use this flexible way of communicating, be curious and look into your ideas. One day some team will become millionaires because they invented a method of using Twitter with a non price related variable to attract customers in a positive way that can be dependable. It’s like the lotto for web developers. Gear up with your knowledge of PHP and start inventing already. Tell me your thoughts on Twitter @matt_lo.
P.S. the @ (at) sign is already mainstreaming into the web as a form of meaning (Twitter contact). When we see example@yahoo.com we know its an email, eventually @example would mean its a Twitter account.
Micro-blogging is now one of the most popular things to do on the phone, personal computer, and now on Xbox gaming console. With only a 140 characters to type, its plenty of room to type an “update status” but not enough to type an essay, which means this makes twitter an easy read. But is that all twitter can really do? Why is Twitter so important if it’s only about updating a person’s status? Facebook has videos, photos, applications, and the status feature…why Twitter?
As Twitter is becoming a custom to society, so is there API. TweetDeck, Tweetie, and DestroyTwitter are all applications and make “tweeting” a more pleasurable experience. Quickly go on a phone and send out a tweet or hop on the laptop to send out a quick status update on DestoryTwitter, without going directly to twitter.com. This is all so popular because of the convenience of twitter. Sure Facebook has an iPhone application, a mobile version of their website, and an extensive API but the interface just has so many options. Any person going on any of these extensions, will be spending about a minute looking at stuff and writing a status update. Twitter is simple, type, press post and it’s there. Read a tweet here and there; catch up on the people following… Twitter is not ever going to bring down Facebook because that website is mainly to connect a whole lives to the world verses Twitter is to connect real-time situations to the world. The nature of Twitter is “NOW”, the nature of Facebook is “What’s Up?”
The popularity of Twitter is so great, more and more developers are clinging to their API to connect it with their own business. A company might purposely leak some of their new product info so they use Twitter to fulfill that motive. An airline company might want to attract first time customers by offering extremely low “instant” tickets to help bridge a long term relationship with the customer. These are ideas that people are using on Twitter. For me though, I’m taking Twitter for a ride like no other.
Over the past 3 months, I have been conjuring ideas in how a massively used system can be used to communicate with other aspects of the Internet, like websites, video games, and news. Thinking to myself, all these are easily accessible at the comfort at my own home, why would I go through the trouble of doing such a thing? The answer is simply mobility. We’re in the world of “NOW”, impatient and thirsty of knowledge in the shortest amount of time. That’s how America is today. Kids all have mobile phones to communicate instead of calling from their home, a 15 minute delay on an airplane causes a mass crowd of “sighing”, and computers tend to be unnecessarily reset if it takes longer than 25 seconds to watch a YouTube video. These setbacks in life are not major, but they do become annoying when we should be in a life of demand with all this technology around us. It’s time to really take advantage of mobility applications and take it to it’s full extent. I plan on making several projects linking the aspect of mobility, to all corners of the web (without Safari).
Using Apache’s Cron Job and the concept of garbage collecting, I can create a website that obtains data and returns a result based on that data. For example using a browserless phone, I want to find out the weather tomorrow morning without going on weather.com because I’m on the train; I type in –FindWeather Tomorrow, within a minute I can receive a reply in how the weather will be the next day. Just enough time in between to check my tweets, text messages, and mail on my phone. Another concept is seeing who’s online in Facebook without going on Facebook. Like I stated before, going on Facebook directly will usually direct your full attention to there even if there’s nobody online. If I don’t want to waste my time loading for Facebook, I can just tweet my way in there to see who is online so if no one is online I won’t have to go onto Facebook. The situation there might seem trivial but its reality to most. If we can check up things without going through a “process”, the hassle of touching/clicking, or the interuption of “friend media”, gathering information from different corners all at the same time can be optimized. This is why I’m trying out this idea, to use Twitter to gather info all in a “any-format” display. These are just some of the ideas I’ll be testing in the upcoming months. I’ll keep a widget on my blog to show the progress of my new ideas.
New theme, new plugins (search cloud, twitter), AND updated my wordpress admin area.
So this night I updated everything on my domain since I’ve been pretty lazy posting, added myself to some project site that asks developers/coders to make websites, downloaded CS4 Flash trial, and I cleaned my desktop since I got a million files just sitting there doing nothing.
I was born in the year 1990, I currently live in Naperville, IL, USA, and enrolled at College of Dupage. I have a pretty good ability to create sites/web applications using PHP, jQuery, CSS, and HTML. I have multiple skill sets for each language/markup. To download my resume, click here.
Download Twitter Follower PHP Script