View Conversations- API Support

Magic_Cindy · 2013-11-09T21:57:00.000Z

This feature would be super helpful for my research if available! +1

As @thom_nic mentioned, the in_reply_to_status_id field can be used as a work around to re-construct a conversation. For any tweets with this field, we can (1) find the tweet this current one is reply to, then go to that tweet to check whether that one has a in_reply_to_status_id field, and continue this step. (2) Search the entire collection of tweets to find whether there exists a tweet with a in_reply_to_status_id that match this current tweet. Do this step for every tweet involved in the conversation.

However, this could work only when you have a relatively small collection of tweets already downloaded for research purpose, since it may take a lot of time searching through for real-time applications. But an advantage of real-time application is that you can just do step(1) for each incoming tweet.

In addition, since API only gives a sample of all tweets, there might be a lot of broken point when trying to re-construct the conversation (I have not tried yet to see how much broken points there can be). Would really appreciate if Twitter API could support the conversation feature including how many conversations a user has engaged in and the length of each conversation.

Zeytoun33 · 2013-12-14T01:01:00.000Z

+1 this should be a default behavior of the API. Why keep it private if twitter.com uses it? Even if users use a different endpoint to interact with twitter’s database, in the end they are still interacting with the twitter brand and that is whats important.

Zeytoun33 · 2013-12-14T19:10:23.000Z

+1 this should be available in the public api since it exists and works.
Why keep it private?

Zeytoun33 · 2014-01-22T16:23:38.000Z

This endpoint is apparently available for Android, so lets play fair and make it available for everyone ?

Tom_Blount · 2014-01-31T15:59:17.000Z

I’d also find this feature incredibly useful for my research into the evolution of discussions on the web!

adriancrepaz · 2014-03-08T16:06:16.000Z

I was also using the related_tweets endpoint in V1, and when it was depreciated in V1.1, this caused big problems for the application I was working on.

I had to create a workaround, which I have documented here, http://adriancrepaz.com/twitter_conversations_api

It scrapes Twitter and it’s very reliable.
I’ve used it for the past few months and have successfully returned thousands of conversations.

If Twitter change their markup, I’ll update the code on Github.

Hope it helps,
Adrian

melanke · 2014-05-04T01:33:51.000Z

Would be great if I could do an App that shows the tweet and the “comments” of the tweet (replies). It is ridiculous that this feature is not implemented.

mjackson051 · 2014-05-07T03:31:36.000Z

Why a you NO help the 'lil guy developer TWITTER ???

jjaone · 2014-09-18T15:36:34.851Z

So Twitter, why don’t you give us (all the non-droid 3rd-party devs) the API end-point for full replys and conversations!? What biz-model of yours does justify your API-policy that make most independent Twitter-clients obsolete (like the othetwise excellent Tweetian for #SailfishOS by @veskuh). Seems that Twitter is learning from FB about how to annoy their user and dev base with these kind of API weakenings.

Would be great to atleast hear some explanations here, or a fix in API 1.2

camolin3 · 2014-10-14T18:53:59.856Z

I can’t believe that as devs we don’t have access to this feature. There’s been more than a year from the first post with this request…

siuying · 2014-12-04T03:12:45.300Z

Its really simple, get a working API that returns conversation thread, like that in Twitter app on all platforms. Why Twitter pretend not hearing from developers?

andypiper · 2014-12-04T10:15:55.473Z

Hi there. We’re certainly listening! As with many situations, we need to prioritise features on the public API, and there are many endpoints to support. We’ll always try to share information about upcoming plans as soon as possible here on the dev forums.

siuying · 2015-01-06T08:18:00.197Z

Thanks Andy! I understand you guys cannot help about the policy of Twitter, but just look everyone here and many other threads, they’re just asking about open this important features to public.

VINEETMEHRA001 · 2015-01-10T18:54:53.240Z

HI @andypiper . Please let us know that whether twitter is planning to make this feature available in future release. Because its already quite a long time . If not please suggest some alternative for it which is feasible.
Thanks in advance.

andypiper · 2015-01-12T09:26:43.658Z

We would certainly let you know if we had any clear plan to make this available in the future - at the current time I have no additional news to share.

svershin · 2015-03-12T09:11:14.405Z

Just wanted to add my voice to the “This would be a great feature to add!” chorus.

AlbertoWAS · 2015-05-05T15:24:52.121Z

+1

weisbergweb · 2015-07-27T22:30:30.973Z

+1 I really could use a feature like this right about now.

kevhender · 2015-09-02T17:05:59.965Z

It’s absolutely INSANE that Twitter still hasn’t added this essential, nearly universally necessary feature to the public API. The silence from them on this issue is absolutely deafening. Shame on you, Twitter API team.

andypiper · 2015-09-03T14:14:24.053Z

There are a lot of things that we need to weigh up when making APIs available, and I’m sorry that it disappoints many of you that conversations hasn’t been one of the ones that has been prioritised. Equally, there are a lot of other things that we have launched over the past year, and other things that are in motion. I’ve certainly tried to answer this request a few times, which I don’t think counts as being silent but I also realise that “this isn’t on the radar at the moment” isn’t the response you’d like to hear.

I’m still not aware of any intent to provide conversations via the public API, but again, if that changes you’d see notifications here and updated documentation on the dev.twitter.com site.