For a case of single-account use like this, you're totally fine using the API to programmatically follow. Most of the terms around automated following are clarified here: http://support.twitter.com/entries/76915-automation-rules-and-best-practiceswith some more general information on the limits of following here: http://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-rules-and-best-practices
Avoid follow-churn: don't follow then unfollow, then refollow. Keep your following rate reasonable -- though you're programmatically following you should still throttle your actions to a polite rate, especially if you're planning on a larger number of follow actions. Finally, make sure you're using an account with a bio and a picture, maybe even some tweets. A generic looking account that follows a bunch of users but has no followers or tweets or identity itself is likely to be reported as spam. @episod <http://twitter.com/episod> - Taylor Singletary On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:32 AM, boblefrag <boblef...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi > I'm working on a website how expose interesting things about cooking and > food. > > We have created a service how use the stream API to get information about > people on twitter talking about our subject of interest. > > In our website, if our administrator thinks that content is good enough, he > mark the twitter account as "interesting" and we look for his tweets with > Stream API. I want to tell that it is a manual action for our admin. > > But we have now the idea to follow this twitter users talking about food > with our account ( 1 account ), the one that we have marked as interressing, > but in reading carefully the ToS Twitter says we cannot auto-follow twitter > account. > > As we don't want to auto-follow but follow programaticaly, principaly to > avoid annoying repetitive task like : mark it as "interressing" in our > website back office then go on twitter to follow them, I'd like to ask you > if it is permited to programaticaly follow people like we want to do ? > > Best regards and thank you in advance. > > -- > Twitter developer documentation and resources: https://dev.twitter.com/doc > API updates via Twitter: https://twitter.com/twitterapi > Issues/Enhancements Tracker: > https://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list > Change your membership to this group: > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/twitter-development-talk > -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: https://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: https://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: https://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/twitter-development-talk