How I wrote a Twitter timeline search app in two days

Re:How I wrote a Twitter timeline search app in two days by dbuthay on Thursday January 20, 2011 @07:11PM (#2125875)

What you see on your timeline at the time you sign up is indexed right away. After that, the app gets all your tweets and those from who you follow. As twitter has an hourly limit for API calls, it may take some time to index your friends history.

It depends on how many friends you have and how much they tweet

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Re:How I wrote a Twitter timeline search app in two days by nc17 on Thursday January 20, 2011 @07:17PM (#2125890)

Thanks, this is useful. I don't understand why Twitter itself doesn't provide this option. I can search for tweets near me, people, tweets with links, etc. but not what I missed when I wasn't online. Could you combine this with other services such as Facebook or email?

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Re:How I wrote a Twitter timeline search app in two days by danwolff on Thursday January 20, 2011 @08:45PM (#2126095)

Are you saying that you can't understand why Twitter's services provide an incentive for you to be online all the time?

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Re:How I wrote a Twitter timeline search app in two days by nc17 on Thursday January 20, 2011 @08:52PM (#2126113)

Good point, hadn't thought of that. I do wonder if proper search would affect people's time on Twitter. I don't find myself coming back for fear of missing out on something, but I do scroll down a lot when I visit. This must be expensive to them, as it causes lots of unnecessary db queries.

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Re:How I wrote a Twitter timeline search app in two days by dbuthay on Thursday January 20, 2011 @07:21PM (#2125898)

probably they didn't do it because it takes too many resources to have a separate index for every user.

I thought about adding Facebook status updates to the index. If people start asking for it, I'll consider doing it.

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