Hello. I started a project whose goal is to allow users to track the reaction of the crowd to their posts. This includes showing all the replies and retweets born as reaction to the original message, organizing the data in a threaded schema. While finding retweets of a particular message is fairly easy using the Search API (Query: "RT @user <some words of the message>"), finding and filtering all the replies can become a non- trivial work quite fast.
While tracking the replies given directly to you isn't particularly hard, though not very efficient (find posts directed to you via search API -- "to:user since_id:<tweet id>" -- and then filter by in_reply_to_status_id), it becomes a nightmare when you want to track what your followers' friends have answered to the replies you got from your own followers. Example of conversation: Me: any idea about how to track the whole conversation originated from this tweet? MyFollower: @Me try posting in the twitter dev talk, maybe they can help you AFollowerOf_MyFollower: @MyFollower I know for sure those guys are very supportive Tracking MyFollower's response is not a big deal, even if the "first fetch them all, then select those you need" may not be the most efficient to implement for large volumes of tweets -- think to the power-users with thousands, if not millions, of followers -- since above certain limits, API usage caps (especially about number of tweets that can be retrieved at once) start becoming an issue. The real problem comes when you want to show in the threaded conversation AFollowerOf_MyFollower's tweet, too. Sure thing, you can use the same strategy as above (Search "to:MyFollower", fetch all, filter by in_reply_to_status_id), but now instead of having to do a single query (to:Me) to retrieve the replies to your posts, you have to perform a fetching and filtering cycle for every person who took part to the conversation: the growth is exponential. A solution may be to allow searches by in_reply_to_status_id (something like "reply:<status id>")... this would greatly lower the cost of looking for replies to your posts. Would it be possible to have such a feature exposed in future? Are there other, more efficient solutions, anybody can suggest to solve my problem efficiently? Thank you for the support. I apologize for the long post and my bad English, but I'm not a native English speaker and I tried to expose my problem as clearly as I could. -- Michele