> (1) Only URL's need to be broadcast with a couple of criptic tag-id's
> - so none of this would resemble a typical Twitter message that is
> made up of words and sentences.
I just asked a related question, where the actual tweet message is not
all that interesting or grokkable. Ideally I think we want a "back
channel" attribute on the tweet that says "this tweet is unsuitable
for direct human consumption".
> (2) The same application would need to "subscribe" to messages from a
> single Twitter user, without forcing application users to create their
> own individual accounts.
You don't need credentials to consume the search api at
http://search.twitter.com,
so you can do something as simple as
http://search.twitter.com/search.js?rpp=100&since_id=xxx&q=from:
where yyy is your tweeting user's screen name and the xxx is the last
tweet that you got from your prior query. Note that you may miss
messages in this because search doesn't surface every tweet and is
only K-sorted... no guarantees. More details here
http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/search
You could ALSO follow a user/list on the client, but that requires
credentials.
Finally, you could (if a desktop application, for now) consume a
UserStream at each client (or in a proxy server for each), but that
will also require credentials on the client (or proxy) site.
As for acquiring client credentials, you could have a commissioning/
setup process on your side to create those credentials (create user
account, OAuth, follow, etc) and then pass this AccessToken and
TokenSecret to the client applications. This would have to be
partially manual simply because [THANK ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY]
twitter accounts creation is still not automatable (captchas and all).
> If not twitter, is there some other service that provides free and
> reliable messaging services, as described above.
Well, Twitter is not (sorry guys) what I would call a "reliable
messaging service". It's kind of (potentially) lossy, so you're going
to need a wrapper around that for transactional symantics (like direct
messages back to the producer when the message sequence number --
yours, not the tweet id -- is out of order or skipping) to handle the
retries and such.
Frankly, if you can't handle the lossy nature, you should probably be
looking at something like Amazon's Simple Messaging Service
http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/ or Simple Notification Service
http://aws.amazon.com/sns/
both are excellent products.
Marc
Hack Prime
Infuz / BuzzRadius / STLTweets
