TwerpScan Blog

The annoying issue of the same contacts being shown several times has been fixed about an hour ago. High-fives all around.

But. Due to the new way the Twitter API is dealing with pagination now (i.e. exactly how apps like TwerpScan are supposed to fetch contacts for people with more than 100 of them), is —excuse my french— a pain in the ass. Let me explain.

Before they’ve made the API changes, an app could just request packets of your contacts in parallel. Let’s say you had ~500 followers, and asked TwerpScan to get them for you. TwerpScan would throw 5 concurrent requests at the Twitter API, basically saying “I want followers 1-100”, “I want followers 101-200”, etc.¹ Each request would take a second or two, but all requests would happen simultaneously, so it didn’t add up that much.

Now these requests have to be made serially, one after the other. This behaviour is forced and can’t be overridden. Unfortunately, it also means the whole process is much slower than before.

I’m pretty sure there are valid reasons for the new behaviour. For one, I imagine it doesn’t put as much strain on their API, which is probably a good thing. But for apps like TwerpScan and their users, it’s not quite as cool.

Just letting you know.

Cheers,
@Carlo / @TwerpScan

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