Proposal for a new Twitter API method

Sunday, 22 November, 2009 - 12:38

This proposal automates an existing, and very popular, use case. It is estimated that it will save between 1,000 and 10,000 RPC calls per invocation, and generally increase user satisfaction.

If you are reading this through an aggregator, formatting may have been lost, so you probably want to see this post in the original page.

spam/all_in_one
Convenience method for spammers.

Changes the user's avatar to a photo of a big-breasted woman, deletes all updates from the user's timeline and inserts one generated via Markov chains, follows between 1,000 and 5,000 randomly-selected users, gets the user's account blocked by 25% and reported as spam by 2% of those users, and finally gets it suspended from Twitter.

All those operations are performed instantly and atomically.

URL:
http://twitter.com/spam/all_in_one.format

Formats:
xml, json

HTTP method:
POST

Requires authentication:
true

API rate limited:
A user is allotted a limited number (1) of spams in a lifetime.

Response:

XML example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<hash>
  <request>/spam/all_in_one.xml</request>
  <error>User has been suspended.</error>
</hash>

Usage examples:

cURL:

curl -u user:password -d '' http://twitter.com/spam/all_in_one.xml