How can I track how long a tweet is active?

[Panerarocks]

Hello Twitter Developers,

Sorry if this question has already been asked, but I could not find it in on the boards.

My question relates to an online business I am creating. I would like to reward my users for tweeting the articles that I post. I only want to reward them if they keep the tweet up for at least 24 hours though so that they don’t just tweet it and remove it a second later. Is this possible, and if so, how? I have looked through most of the documentation, and I can’t seem to find a solid way to do this.

If it isn’t possible, do you have any suggestions on how I might go about doing this?

Thanks,

Panerarocks

[episod]

Whether a user deletes a tweet they created or not is really private information for that user alone – I wouldn’t recommend using it as the basis for any kind of decision-making in your application.

That said, there’s no way to be notified of when a specific user has deleted a tweet they issued. You could occasionally make API requests to statuses/show to determine whether the tweet exists or not.

[Panerarocks]

Thank you for your quick response!

If I were to get their username associated with their account on my website, would I be able to use that username to do an automatic search on twitter to tell if they kept it active for 24 hours?

[episod]

I’d still recommend that you remove this requirement from your plan and deal with people gaming your business in a different way – the only “meaning” of a deleted tweet that you’re really safe to interpret is that the tweet no longer exists and that you need to remove it from your records. I’d be exceptionally cautious around attaching any meaning to a deleted tweet event beyond that.

More constructively:
How were you planning on keeping yourself informed when these tweets are created? (How do users tell you they’ve tweeted – are you using the streaming API to match a hashtag, URL, @mention, etc?). Instead of checking whether a tweet has “been deleted” or not, couldn’t you just wait to see if the tweet exists at all – 24 hours after the user claimed to have tweeted?

[Panerarocks]

Well…my plan was to have some JavaScript track when they were tweeted and be stored in my database. I just need to figure out a way to track the tweet. I got this idea from a website that had articles on it with the same rewards system that I am talking about here.

[niall]

[niall]