Saturday, November 5, 2016

Tragedy In Reno

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Twitter Streams: Top Tweets From Selected Accounts, Grouped By Topics

Twitter Streams: Top Tweets From Selected Accounts, Grouped By Topics

 

 Twitter has streams of tweets described at "Top Tweets" from Twitter-selected users for a number of different topics. They are made so people who don't have Twitter accounts can easily find interesting tweets, and thus find Twitter worth signing up for. The urls all start with "twitter.com/i/streams/stream" follow by a number. There are a number of them with low integer numbers like 1,2,3,5, but there are gaps like the missing 4. I suspect the missing numbers were once valid but removed, but this is just a guess. After a hundred or two of the low integers ID numbers, the numbers start back up with huge numbers like 686639666779426849, which is apparently the result of a switch in how Twitter numbers tweets, a change to using Snowflake IDs, announced in 2010 in a blog post Announcing Snowflake.  The name Snowflake ID comes from snowflakes being known of as unique, which is an essential property of Twitter ID numbers.



If you click these links while you are logged into Twitter, you will see an out of place looking login form. Just ignore it. If you log in on it, you will lose the nice list of top tweets from selected accounts twitter picked and you will be on your normal timeline.




https://twitter.com/i/streams/stream/686639666779426849

I don't find these listed anywhere, and it seems like a useful list, and I've spent an absurd amount of time figuring this out, and I want to stop thinking about, so I am hopefully taking it out of my brain and putting it on the internet.