How long are cursor values valid?

DustyReagan · 2012-11-15T21:59:18.000Z

Regarding cursors: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/misc/cursoring

How long are the next_cursor and previous_cursor values valid for? Is it a matter of minutes, hours, days, weeks, indefinitely?

I ask because with the new rate limits on friends/ids and followers/ids it will be impossible to pull more than 75k ids before having to wait 15 minutes to pull another batch. For a user like @starbucks, it would take more than 10 hours to pull their social graph, before analysis of their graph could be performed. Though this is less than ideal, it could be possible to perform some useful analysis if a margin of error was acceptable by the user, and the next_cursor and previous_cursor values were valid for an extended period of time.

episod · 2012-11-15T22:28:58.000Z

While I can’t say they’ll last forever, they are close enough to indefinitely that you should be able to continue from a returned cursor for the foreseeable future. Definitely within the context of a request-wait-request cycle, but likely even if you stored the last accessed cursor and continued weeks later.

DustyReagan · 2012-11-15T23:45:55.000Z

Perfect! I can build a caching system with that I think. Thanks for the quick reply!

peterkronenberg · 2013-12-06T20:24:54.000Z

Does the cursor need to be used by the some auth token or can anyone use it and get the same results?

chrisbeach · 2017-06-02T12:50:45.458Z

peterkronenberg:

Does the cursor need to be used by the some auth token or can anyone use it and get the same results

I’d like to know the answer to this too - can anyone help?