Twitter® Application Development for Dummies®

Chapter 20. Ten Twitter API Tips

In This Chapter

• Gleaning advice from other Twitter developers

One of the best ways to learn is to do. However, the next best way to learn is to glean advice from other people's experience. You've heard a lot from me in this book about my experience with the Twitter API, now here are some tips from other Twitter developers.

Develop Defensively

"Develop defensively. For instance, when passing in scoping parameters like since_id, assume that the Twitter API will break one day and disregard since_id when building the result set."

–Barry Hess (@bjhess), co-creator of Follow Cost (http://followcost.com)

Degrade Gracefully

"The Twitter API can and will go down. Applications should have some sort of monitoring, graceful degradation, and informative error messages for users in the event that this happens. Because if you don't, your app gets blamed, not Twitter."

–Damon Cortesi (@dacort), creator of TweetStats (http://tweetstats.com) and TweepSearch (http://tweepsearch.com)

Don't Rely on screen_name

"Always use user_id to reference accounts instead of screen_name. screen_name could change at anytime."

–Abraham Williams (@abraham)

Use 64-Bit Integers

"Be sure to use long integers (Int64 in the .NET world) for storing ID values. 32-bit integers aren't large enough for the ID values that Twitter is producing."

–Duane Roelands (@DWRoelands), creator of Quitter (http://getquitter.com)

Subscribe to the Google Group

"Expect things to change. Twitter is a rapidly developing service, ...