Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Probably Nothing Special: Blabbermouths on Twitter

Had a side thought that I'm sure someone has already thought of and implemented:
  • Find an account on Twitter that requires authz to view his or her account
  • From an authn'd but unauthz'd Twitter API client, do the following:
    • Enumerate all the followers and following of this person (authn'd users can do this)
    • Search favorited tweets from this user; store the blabbermouth
    • Search conversations from this user; store the blabbermouth
    • Search RT's / @mentions for this user; store the blabbermouth
  • Use the gathered favorited and conversation data to reconstruct a timeline (tweet IDs are time stamps) of possible tweets
  • Use the @mentions and RTs to match up the tweet to a possible timeline tweet
It's more that likely that one cannot construct a full timeline of some target's tweets. Also, matching up the RTs / @mentions is fraught with mismatching. But, one could start to see who blabs out all of the tweets and then unfollow that person. I'm sure my account would be unfollowed since I do the above with impunity :-) That is, Twitter is not meant for secrets.

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