Twitter® Application Development for Dummies®

Chapter 7. Managing Users and Their Relationships

In This Chapter

• Working examples of the API in PHP

• Getting data on users and their friends

• Managing Twitter lists

• Following, unfollowing, blocking, and reporting spam

This chapter covers Twitter API methods that deal with users and their relationships with other Twitter users. It covers 17 methods that you can use to do things like:

• Follow a new user

• Get a list of users friends

• Create and manage a list of users

• Block a user

• Report a user as a spammer

User Methods

Every Twitter user has site usage data, such as their profile information, how many followers they have, their last status update, the date they created their account, their total amount of tweets, and et cetera. To get at that data you need to pull the user object for that Twitter user. You can get that data with API most effectively, using these three methods:

• users/show

• statuses/friends

• statuses/followers

Get the details of a user

You can get the complete details of any public user on Twitter by using the users/show method.

This method doesn't require authentication, but to get the details of a protected Twitter account, you must

• Authenticate your API call

• Have permission to view the protected account.

This method requires a GET request and is rate limited. The sidebar "Hard Knocks" explains the concern with rate limits.

Output

This method has two output formats:

• XML

• JSON

On a successful method call it returns the complete user object, which contains the last status update.

If an account doesn't ...