Twitterator launched: Come and play
April 14th, 2008 | by Tim Wilson |I may attract the trademark police for this, but so be it.
It seemed like an innocent enough question at the time, but when Steve Dembo (teach42) posted a tweet last week looking for a way to import a list of Twitter names to follow I decided to run with it. It seemed like a straightforward programming challenge, and after a little twittering back and forth with Dave Briccetti I had it pretty much worked out in my head.
Twitterator, then, is a really simple web application that takes a list of twitter usernames and allows you to follow them in one fell swoop. Take a look and see what you think. I have to warn you though. This is a pretty basic CGI script, and it’s not going to be particularly fast. It depends on Twitter.com’s servers being available which can be a bit of a crapshoot. Using Twitterator may cause dizziness, shortness of breath, locusts, giant meteors, and (wait for it) sexual dysfunction. Tell you doctor if you’re using Twitterator. Don’t taunt Twitterator!
I think this could be pretty useful for training sessions. For example, you could keep a list of twitter usernames in a file on the Internet somewhere and use that URL to follow those people. You could keep lists organized by academic subject or whatever else works for you. Once the file exists at a certain URL, a bunch of people could start following those people within minutes of creating their Twitter accounts. You can also paste in a bunch of usernames manually from a blog post, wiki page, or some other source. I tried to make it as bulletproof as reasonably possible, but you’ll have to ensure that the usernames are listed one per line.
Feel free to leave suggestions for improvements or creative uses in the comments. I hope everyone finds Twitterator useful. It’s fun to exercise my programming chops once in a while, and if this brings Dembo one step closer to world domination then it’s all been worth it.
Update: All Twitterator links have been updated to point to the new URL.
Tags: programming, python, twitter, twitterator, wiki
7 Responses to “Twitterator launched: Come and play”
By Dave Briccetti on Apr 14, 2008 | Reply
Nice job, Tim. That’s a handy tool.
By Steve Dembo on Apr 15, 2008 | Reply
Freakin’ cool. It works great and I”ve already gotten much use out of it.
I’m thinking that DabbleDB could be used to create groups online, since the data can be output with static URL’s. Have to play with that later.
NICE work!
By Tim Wilson on Apr 15, 2008 | Reply
Steve, your DabbleDB idea sounds really cool. Try making a group, and I’ll see if I can modify Twitterator so that it will read it properly. Right know, it’s pretty strict about the formatting of the file at the other end of the URL.
By Deboraha Laster on Apr 22, 2009 | Reply
Followed the directions in the email sent to me. Copied the list of Twitter names from the LinkedIn spreadsheet, copied to Twitterator and received message that either username, password or list was missing. Tried 3x and it did still did not work.
By Tim Wilson on Apr 22, 2009 | Reply
Deborah, it may be that the spreadsheet has some formatting that’s giving Twitterator fits. If you can send me a portion of the file, I’ll take a look and see what might be happening.
By Kelly on Jan 3, 2010 | Reply
Hi Tim,
I was really excited about this, but I think I have misunderstood it’s purpose.
What I would like to do, is to copy the url of the a list (like the ones on the right side of the page and automatically follow everyone that is listed in that group.
I can see that I will be fairly erked when someone just copies the list that I am spending hours creating, but I have created the list as I am not able to follow everyone I want to at the moment, but as soon as I am able to I would like to add them.
When I copied the url for my list, http://twitter.com/TASTOUR/pr/members, I received an error. Is this how the app is meant to work?
Thanks for your help!
Kelly
By Tim Wilson on Jan 4, 2010 | Reply
Kelly,
Check out the help page at http://twitterator.org/help.html
You need to create a file on your server that has one Twitter username per line. Twitterator doesn’t know how to look at a regular web page and figure out which text is actually a list of Twitter usernames.