We are investigating integrating twitter into our mobile marketing product, but have run into some design choices by twitter and missing functionality that make this difficult and/or impossible. I'm posting here to see if we're just looking at this wrong.
Here's the logic: 1. We want to use the API to invite someone to follow us by sending an SMS. Problem is, http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml does not seem to support INVITE. We want to send "invite 1234567890" through the API. 2. When we dispatch an INVITE through SMS to 40404 (US) and then respond from the invited phone with a new nickname, we follow the person inviting us. Oddly, though, device updates are not on by default for the new SMS-only account, so we never get updates from the person that invited us since device notifications are off. This seems like a bug - what use is it to invite someone via SMS, ask them to set a nickname, then never update them with status updates from the person that invited them. As an SMS-only user, the only way to get updates is to go the web, finish activating the new account, then turn on device updates. Seems wrong and not useful. a. We noticed a bug in the invite code via SMS. We respond with nickname then we are prompted for it a second time by another text (duplicate prompt). The second time we provide it, that name is put on our status. 3. When we invite someone, we never get an alert that the person we invited accepted the invite. We do get an SMS response that says "you'll hear from your friend soon." Well, when and how? We're in the dark - did our friend take us up on the offer? And, if we invite several people, and later go check our followers list with the API, we have no way to match up the mobile number (that we used to invite) with the nickname they chose. If I invite someone via mobile number, the API followers call should include that in the XML return code so that we can match up the invitation to the chosen nickname and assigned twitter account id. Our wish list: direct_messages/invite.xml > mobile number > callback url, when invite accepted, this url is triggered with args of mobile > #, chosen username, twitter id (no privacy issue as we knew the mobile number > to do the invite in the first place) >>> abuse tracking: either a) whitelist this ability like rate limiting, or b) >>> if too many STOP messages are accumulated by the account, disable the >>> ability Have we missed something? TIA. Travis twitter.com/tlpriest
