Ignoring tweets from non-followed users

[TradeHawk]

I’m in the process of converting my UserStream app to use the generic streaming API. My UserStream app uses (with’ => ‘followings’, ‘replies’ => ‘all’) so that if I follow a very popular account, I only see the popular accounts tweets and conversations between the popular account and other accounts I follow. When I connect with the Streaming API, I see tweets from the popular account and 100 tweets per second from everybody else on the planet addressing the popular account. What is the magic connect parameter to only see tweets and replies to/from those that I explicitly follow?

Thanks!

[LeBraat]

Hello @TradeHawk - Thank you for writing in!

I’m assuming that you are using statuses/filter. You will have to use the follow parameter and add all of your followers to pull just those Tweets that are being posted by your followers.

You can read more about this parameter here.

[TradeHawk]

Correct, I am using statuses/filter. However, for example if I select only one very popular single account to follow (lets say the leader of a big country), even though that person only tweets a few times a day, there are 500 replies per minute to his tweets from people I don’t follow that are of no interest. With the UserStream user.json endpoint if I specify (with’ => ‘followings’, ‘replies’ => ‘all’) it doesn’t show replies from people I don’t follow, As a result, I currently don’t see those extra 500 replies per minute that are of no interest, only tweets by the person I care about and only replies to him from people I follow, not the other 99.9% of the world.

It doesn’t look like the streaming API has a filtering capability like this but I hope I’m wrong. UserStreams saves a ton of bandwidth because of this capability. If the streaming API has no feature to discard replies from non-followed accounts, is there any other realtime steaming API that’s not being depreciated that can do this (and save a ton of bandwidth)? If I were to follow 50 or 100 high profile users, replies to those tweets from users I don’t follow could easily be thousands of tweets per minute that are of no interest.

[LeBraat]

Your concerns have been heard. I encourage you to review our documentation on the PowerTrack product and keep an eye on this item on our roadmap.

If you do not pursue the Powertrack product, there might be a period of time where you will have to use the statuses/filter endpoint to satisfy your use case though. That period of time being the time between the deprecation of User streams and Site streams and the launch of the new endpoint to replace statuses/filter.

[TradeHawk]

Thanks for the reply and suggestions. I’m sure the PowerTrack API is well out of my budget. I’ll keep an eye on the new statuses/filter endpoint and pray that it comes soon. Regards…

I was going to reply with some stats but this thread was just closed a few minutes ago. Just FYI for reference… using UserStreams and following about 2000 accounts, during peak hours of the day I was processing an average of 1500 tweets per hour. SInce UserStreams is gone, using the generic streaming API and following the same 2000 accounts now requires processing about 18,000 tweets per hour at peaks. I sure hope that new status/filter endpoint has some “don’t stream retweets and replies from non-followed accounts” feature. This is pure wasted bandwidth.

[system]

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