Twitter Reader

Owned by Carrie Warner (Unlicensed)
Last updated: May 04, 2020 by Georg Hentsch
2 min read

Twitter Reader uses the twitter search api to populate tweets based on searches setup in Flow. Searches are define within twitter topics allowing multiple searches to populate a single topic. The number of tweets are defined in the topic/search. The topic will never have more tweets than defined, deleting older tweets as new ones are added.

Twitter topics are set up and managed in Flow for Twitter Reader to populate using the Flow Configuration > Twitter Topic Control. See the topic Twitter Topic Control for details.

The Twitter tab has several settings to consider:

  1. Filter on Black List words? - in Flow a list of black list words/patterns can be setup. If checked, tweets matching words/patterns will be ignored. This is especially important when doing searches based on hashtags.

  2. Remove potentially sensitive tweets - in the Twitter search api, there is additional detention for sensitive tweets. It searches not only text but media. This option is useful again when searching on hashtags.

  3. User Accounts - All access to the Twitter API requires a user account which has approval to Chameleon’s twitter application. Each account has a rate limit which is a way of limiting the number of api calls an account can have over a period of time. That’s why it’s useful to have several accounts available for twitter searches to avoid rate limits which will prevent searches from happening until the rate limit drops. In Twitter Reader, we provide 2 choices for user accounts. The Global User Pool and accounts defined in Flow. The Global User Pool is a group of about 100 twitter accounts BL has setup to do searches on. That’s a shared pool of accounts for all Chameleon customers. The preferred choice is to setup your own pool of users. That is done in Flow in the Accounts tab for the Twitter data type. In either case, the Twitter Reader randomly chooses one of the accounts for each search. This helps to spread the searches among multiple accounts and lessens the chances of a rate limit restriction.