Tweet Contest logic ( Twitter )

Question

Disclaimer: I have no Twitter API experience nor have I used Twitter until today

I've been given the task of creating a 'tweeting contest' - if anyone has Twitter API experience and/or has done this in the past, I would appreciate any useful tips that you may have.

So the basic rules are that in order for a user to enter the contest, said user must follow the contest's twitter and must retweet with a specific message, such as 'just entered a contest for http://foo.com/contest'.

Questions:

1. To get the entrants, I have to parse the rss feed of the contest, http://twitter.com/statuses/user%5Ftimeline/21586418.rss seems to only list the last few posts so I would probably have to interact with the Twitter API in order to get all messages. Can someone recommend documentation or a page that covers this?

2. I'm not exactly sure if I should store the actual users in a local xml file or rely on querying the Twitter API, if I store them I would have a cache local copy of users... a database would be overkill and if I were to store them it would be better off in an xml file, right?

3. Related to #1, should I actually parse for the exact message which the user has to tweet, eg "just entered a contest", the exact string when I parse through the data feed of all the tweets? Or is there some sort of tagging system I can use?

4. Related to #1, I would have to determine whether the user is a follower or not, so I can't determine that by parsing an entry/tweet, I would have to query the user's id and grab statistics from the people he/she follows?

Answer 1

You could search for the URL, but the best approach would be to use a hashtag:

just entered #supercoolcontest for http://foo.com/contest

You can search for incidences of #supercoolcontest which contain the required contest URL or whatever other keywords you might want. This will ensure users don't have to be text-precise when retweeting, and also gives people a way to talk about the contest in a general way that is trackable.

You can pull all tweets with a hashtag by using the search API:

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%23supercoolcontest

This is probably the most efficient approach, since you are guaranteed to only pull the tweets you're interested in, instead of n tweets from n users, only a tiny fraction of which has anything to do with you.

Every time you scrape that API feed (every n minutes), insert new unique users. I'd use a database - not hard or time consuming to stand something up with a table or two. Easier to query against later.

To answer your last question, you do need to make a separate API call to determine if a given user follows another user.