Twitter replies in your inbox without giving out your login data? (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)

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YDN YDN Blog Twitter replies in your inbox without giving out your login data?

Yahoo! Developer Network Blog

January 6, 2009

Twitter replies in your inbox without giving out your login data?

There's been quite an uproar in the blogosphere about the sale of Twply, a service that would allow you to get email updates every time someone sends you a reply on Twitter. The issue is that Twply asked users for their Twitter login data to get their services, and then stored this information.

This would not be that much of a problem, if Twply hadn't been sold for $1200 on Sitepoint. A lot of people considered this quite a small price to pay for a lot of private user information.

While the maintainers of Twply have now announced that the sale was for traffic and that the user database is not part of the deal, it *is* a bad plan to give out any login data to a third party. This is why oAuth is getting more and more traction.

All that aside, you can get the same functionality Twply offers without having to give any of your data away. All you need is a Yahoo account.

Step 1: Find the data

What we need is a data feed that contains the tweets people send with @yourname in it. This can be done with Twitter's own search. For example to search for all people answering me you can use http://search.twitter.com/search?q=@codepo8.

Twitter search also has a feed of that data, available at: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%40codepo8.

Step 2: Set up a Yahoo Alert

You can then use this feed and add it to a Yahoo Alert, which either sends you an email when it changes, notifies you on messenger or even sends you a mobile message. To achieve that, all you need is the following URL:

http://alerts.yahoo.com/edit_feedalert.php
?url=http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%40codepo8
&done=http://alerts.yahoo.com/myalerts.php

Simply change codepo8 to your twitter name and that's that.

Step 3: There is no step 3

That's all there is. Technically the best solution to this problem would be Twitter providing the replies-as-email functionality themselves, but in the interim this should do the trick.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Posted at January 6, 2009 8:28 AM

Comments

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the link to SitePoint.

The controversy that Twply caused is unfortunate, but hopefully something good can come out if it if the incident raises Twitter security awareness.

Thankfully, Twply.com was auctioned off to a reputable firm -- iEntry Inc -- so its in good hands now. We've seen quite a few Twitter services go up for auction recently, build 'em & sell 'em seems like a popular strategy.

Posted by: Matt Mickiewicz at January 6, 2009 10:54 AM

"All that aside, you can get the same functionality Twply offers without having to give any of your data away."

I'm afraid that's not quite true. Using the technique shown here you'll only receive notifications about tweets with @yourusername in them if the person who tweeted did so publicly. Part of the reason twply required login credentials was that the only way to access a feed containing replies from private people is to use twitter's /statuses/replies API call.

That said, using search.twitter.com does have its advantages, not least of which is that it will return tweets which contain @yourusername anywhere within them, not just at the start. I use this technique to keep track of mentions of me over on my lifestream at http://neilcrosby.com

Posted by: Neil Crosby at January 7, 2009 2:31 AM

OAuth needs to be kicked in overdrive. Many users are complaining that they hate inputting passwords all over the place and when the Twitter scam and phishing scam came about, this should really speed things up

Posted by: JustinSMV at January 11, 2009 11:18 AM

Hi Chris, there seems to be a problem with the url i provided above. The alert service says the url is not valid.. Broken or are my tweets that terrible :)

Posted by: Ramon Eijkemans at February 13, 2009 1:11 AM