As much as Meerkat's spam tactics downgrade my level of sympathy, I still think this is pretty awful behavior on Twitter's part. The list of people I follow is, essentially, personal information about me and them, contributed by me. I shouldn't be prevented from accessing my own information with the app or service of my choice; it shouldn't be part of a corporate fiefdom.
Still waiting for the first attempt to test the legal waters on scraping Twitter.
I don't think Twitter has anything against scraping lists of followers of public accounts -- after all, that's available to everyone. (One exception I think is geolocation data which can't be stored.) It's then using that information to spam Twitter itself that's the problem.
Facebook, OTOH, has pretty much turned off access to the friends graph for apps other than games.
This is probably the only fair endpoint that Twitter has in terms of rate limiting. Getting that scale of information via conventional scraping would be infeasable.
Comments
As much as Meerkat's spam tactics downgrade my level of sympathy, I still think this is pretty awful behavior on Twitter's part. The list of people I follow is, essentially, personal information about me and them, contributed by me. I shouldn't be prevented from accessing my own information with the app or service of my choice; it shouldn't be part of a corporate fiefdom.
Still waiting for the first attempt to test the legal waters on scraping Twitter.
I don't think Twitter has anything against scraping lists of followers of public accounts -- after all, that's available to everyone. (One exception I think is geolocation data which can't be stored.) It's then using that information to spam Twitter itself that's the problem.
Facebook, OTOH, has pretty much turned off access to the friends graph for apps other than games.
In fairness, Twitter's API endpoints for accessing followers/following have fair rate limits. (75k follower Twitter IDs every 15 minutes)
https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/friends/ids
This is probably the only fair endpoint that Twitter has in terms of rate limiting. Getting that scale of information via conventional scraping would be infeasable.