“Pull” Twitter Apps Not Practical Until…

By Steve Poland • March 28, 2007

“Pull” Twitter apps aren’t very practical until a setting is added to each user account. Right now, if someone adds me as a friend — I still can’t receive any direct messages they send me, until I add them as my friend too. And even once I were to do that, I wouldn’t receive any direct messages they sent prior to me friending them.

(Note to Twitter team: You should notify a user if they send a direct message and the other party can’t receive it, because they aren’t a friend of that user. I’d just send a direct message back to the user from a ‘Twitter’ username that says, “You are not a friend of ‘[username]‘ and your direct message did not send.”)

Here’s what needs to happen — I have a request into the Twitter dev team:
Basically we’re talking Twitter bots now. But in order for a username to acknowledge a direct message from a user, the username must add the requesting user as a friend first — otherwise it doesn’t get the direct message.

Thus, I’m suggesting under ‘Settings’ there might be a new category called ‘Friends’, with only one option right now — “Automatically become friends with users requesting to be your friend” (default option is ‘no’ or unchecked).

Otherwise, as a bot owner, I’d have to login to the bot’s username account multiple times a day, approve the users as friends… and by that time, the requesting user might forget about the bot, and never come back to it.

Note to Techquila Shots readers: I promise to eventually get off my Twitter high, but this is just too exciting at the moment for me. Ignore these Twitter posts if you don’t care about the service

Twitter - What Will Dominate: Content Push or Content Pull? I don’t know what will blow up and be used more on Twitter — content push plays, or pull plays. Push would be having ‘NFL’ as a friend and getting all the latest NFL news...
How to create a Twitter bot Determine what your bot will do. Capabilities include the ability to push information publicly to everyone (i.e. a sports team bot might push the current score of a game after each new point scored;...
Make Money With Twitter! 5 Monetization Models With Twitter’s recent API addition, there is potential for many new applications to be built off the Twitter back-end (although, not quite yet). Twitter usernames are essentially keywords used for these applications built on the...
I’m the first Twitter spammer, ugh There’s a lot of things I am, but this wasn’t one of them that I expected to become — particularly given my love for the Twitter service. But things are fine with the Twitter team...
IDEA #73 - Friends Categorized as API to other Facebook Apps Another Facebook application idea comin’ at ya!… Robert Scoble has vocalized how he doesn’t like the restriction Facebook puts on your number of friends (5,000) and that he wants as many people to be his...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments

4 Responses to ““Pull” Twitter Apps Not Practical Until…”

Dimitry on March 28th, 2007 11:37 pm (perm link)

Very good proposition/request.

I’d love to see this in action and I agree about user forgetting about the bot (unless they’re befriended back right away).
Techquila Shots » Make Money With Twitter! 5 Monetization Models on March 29th, 2007 9:23 am (perm link)

[...] there is potential for many new applications to be built off the Twitter back-end (although, not quite yet). Twitter usernames are essentially keywords used for these applications built on the Twitter [...]
Jesse Newland on March 29th, 2007 10:57 am (perm link)

Glad to see you realized this before going hog-wild with these twitter bots. The urban dictionary bot is a nice proof-of-concent, but the way it functions now is un-usable - a 5 minute delay? Where’s the convenience in that? I bet I could get a quicker response from my human followers. The direct message API is ripe for web-services possibilities - if this request is honored.
nicolas dengler on March 29th, 2007 12:03 pm (perm link)

Excellent request Steve!
we have the same need for a service we’re currently developing. We saw that there is an url to do this, and we were thinking about calling it directly from time to time (http://twitter.com/followers/befriend_all) but sure, asking twitter directly is a lot more clever, thanks