Twitter feed on corporate site

Question

I have a corporate website that I want to pull in tweets to, but i'm getting a rate limit using the http feed. So, I want to use an authenticated method to get the tweets.

Do I really have to register an application to do this, even though it's not really an application and my users will never be entering or changing the twitter account info.

Also, my corporate site doesn't have a public address, and registering an application through twitter appears to require a public url. So how can I get around this? Do I have to create a "fake" application with a public url, just to generate my keys?

Thanks for any help on this.

Answer 1

Just wanted to post this for future reference and in case anyone else has the same question. The solution to my problem, was to register an application on twitter. But since I'm just using a single user, you don't have to do the regular OAuth steps of generating a request for a key, getting the response etc. Every app you register in twitter get's its own "Access Token" that you can use to retrieve tweets etc. So, this is what I ended up doing to solve the problem I was having.

Additional details: My main concern was having to do the OAuth steps of requesting an access code etc... Since my application is only a single user implementaion (just pulling in our company related tweets from company held twitter accounts), it just seemed unneccesary to have to do all of that. But what I found was that when you register an app on twitter, you get a private access token for each app. You can view a little information about that here: https://dev.twitter.com/pages/oauth_single_token.

Answer 2

If your site is behind a proxy server along with all your users, using Javascript/jQuery won't help. All the requests will still be coming from the same IP and will hit a rate limit, as you're doing now.

The other issue is that you don't need to register an app to request a feed. Apps are only needed for Oauth, and getting a feed doesn't need that.

The best way to deal with this is to get the feed with a server script, store it on the server, and then deliver the server copy to the web pages. If you request the feed less than 150 times per hour, you won't have a limit problem.

If you want more than a single feed, you can use the streaming API to get all the tweets for up to 400 keywords or from up to 5,000 users. This still doesn't need a registered app, since the streaming API still allows Basic Auth.

Answer 3

It sounds like you are pulling the feed down over http on the server? You could just limit the updates so you don't hit the rate limit.

I would recommend instead doing this on the client side. There are a lot of very easy to use embeddable java script twitter clients out there. The rate limiting problem would dissapear as the feed would be coming from the desktop and not the server (unless they just kept refreshing it).

• The Twitter developer wiki lists a few.

• JQuery plugin for Twitter

• Tweet (another JQuery plugin)