Can you? - Need a way to know when a user follows another user

[RobsonINC]

Problem is that we want to know when a user follows another user. This “other user” - I know you could just gather all the users and diff the list with an updated one. What if that user had 1M followers and follows 5 more.

So the obvious answer has a rate limiting issue. We would like to grab new followers on a specific date and a list of those twitter IDs.

Thoughts?

[RobsonINC]

I just want new as of a date. Not all… GET/Followers will ratelimit

[RobsonINC]

Would this work?

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/ids.json?cursor=1000000000&screen_name=harry_styles&count=100 - would an extenuated cursor jump to the end of the follow list and anything added to this list would be new?

[abraham]

According to GET followers/ids:

At this time, results are ordered with the most recent following first — however, this ordering is subject to unannounced change and eventual consistency issues.

While the ordering is not guaranteed by the API, it has been ordered this way since the launch of this endpoint so it’s relatively safe to rely on. You can start with cursor=-1 and pageinate through the 5000 most recent follower ids until they majority of them start overlapping with your existing list of followers.

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/ids.json?screen_name=harry_styles&cursor=-1