Recommended way to construct social graph

[apritchard]

A couple years ago I worked on an academic project to study propagation of ideas across social network graphs in Twitter. I finally got around to updating my program for the latest Twitter API and find that it barely works at all any more, because of the 15 GET/followers / 15 minutes query limit. The old hourly limit was a struggle, but at least allowed small networks to be mapped in a reasonable duration. The new limitation essentially makes Twitter API useless for this purpose.

Is there any alternative means of constructing social network graphs faster than 1 user per minute? I’ve seen a couple posts essentially asking a similar question and they have all gone unanswered, so I’m not super optimistic, but on the off chance Twitter developers come across this - even letting us use the 180/15m rate for followers queries would be a huge help. I’m not trying to remap the internet, but there seems to be no reasonable way to study second degree connections.

[andypiper]

We definitely read all of the posts but we don’t always have a chance to answer all of them, and in this case there’s no great answer - there’s no current plan to open up the API limits around followers or the social graph, I’m afraid. We’ll take note of the request, but this is not a priority at this time.

[apritchard]

Thanks for the response Andy. While I would obviously prefer a different answer, I appreciate having an answer!