API vs RSI

World’s-most-famous-twitterer Stephen Fry has a system for handling follow requests: you tweet using the #followmestephen hashtag, and he wades diligently through them, manually following people.

This seems an odd sort of thing to do – most people choose whom to follow based on whether they know them or like what they say, rather than on request – but I suppose when you have over a quarter of a million followers things work a little differently. It also creates lots of work , and looks like an ideal candidate for automation.

I thought I’d have a quick play with the Twitter API this morning (no doubt I’m not the only one), and cobbled together the script below, which you can also download as follow_me_stephen.rb (although if you’re not Mr Fry I’m not sure why you would want to). Save the file, and run using ruby follow_me_stephen.rb.

I wanted to avoid having too many dependencies, so I didn’t use the twitter gem, or the excellent httparty, but I was too lazy to figure out all the XPaths to handle the Atom version of the API. This means you need to have the JSON gem installed, which is as simple as sudo gem install json (omit the sudo on Windows).

The script’s pretty dumb, in that it grabs the whole set of search results every time, and blindly requests to follow everyone, regardless of whether you’re already following them.

[ruby]
#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require ‘net/http’

begin
require ‘json’
rescue LoadError
STDERR.puts <

No JSON parser found. Please run the following command to install:

sudo gem install json

EOF
raise
end

module FollowMeStephen
def run
auth_user, password = get_user_details
requestors = fetch_requestors
requestors.each do |user|
follow user, auth_user, password
end
end

private

def get_user_details
print ‘Please enter your Twitter username: ‘
auth_user = gets.chomp
print ‘Please enter your Twitter password: ‘
password = gets.chomp
return auth_user, password
end

def fetch_requestors
requestors = []
puts ‘Searching for hashtag “followmestephen”…’
query = ‘?q=%23followmestephen&rpp=150′
while query do
search = JSON.parse(get(“/search.json#{query}”))
puts “Received page #{search['page']}”
requestors += search['results'].map {|r| r['from_user']}
query = search['next_page']
end
requestors.uniq
end

def follow user, auth_user, password
print “Following #{user}… ”
result = post “/friendships/create/#{user}.json”, auth_user, password
puts result
end

def get path
Net::HTTP.get ‘search.twitter.com’, path
end

def post path, auth_user, password
request = Net::HTTP::Post.new path
request.basic_auth auth_user, password
response = Net::HTTP.new(‘twitter.com’).start {|http| http.request(request)}
(response.kind_of? Net::HTTPSuccess) ? ‘OK’ : ‘Failed’
end
end

include FollowMeStephen
run
[/ruby]