“Pull” Twitter Apps Not Practical Until…
By Steve Poland • March 28, 2007
“Pull” Twitter apps aren’t very practical until a setting is added to each user account. Right now, if someone adds me as a friend — I still can’t receive any direct messages they send me, until I add them as my friend too. And even once I were to do that, I wouldn’t receive any direct messages they sent prior to me friending them.
(Note to Twitter team: You should notify a user if they send a direct message and the other party can’t receive it, because they aren’t a friend of that user. I’d just send a direct message back to the user from a ‘Twitter’ username that says, “You are not a friend of ‘[username]’ and your direct message did not send.”)
Here’s what needs to happen — I have a request into the Twitter dev team:
Basically we’re talking Twitter bots now. But in order for a username to acknowledge a direct message from a user, the username must add the requesting user as a friend first — otherwise it doesn’t get the direct message.
Thus, I’m suggesting under ‘Settings’ there might be a new category called ‘Friends’, with only one option right now — “Automatically become friends with users requesting to be your friend” (default option is ‘no’ or unchecked).
Otherwise, as a bot owner, I’d have to login to the bot’s username account multiple times a day, approve the users as friends… and by that time, the requesting user might forget about the bot, and never come back to it.
Note to Techquila Shots readers: I promise to eventually get off my Twitter high, but this is just too exciting at the moment for me. Ignore these Twitter posts if you don’t care about the service 
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4 Responses to ““Pull” Twitter Apps Not Practical Until…”
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Very good proposition/request.
I’d love to see this in action and I agree about user forgetting about the bot (unless they’re befriended back right away).
[…] there is potential for many new applications to be built off the Twitter back-end (although, not quite yet). Twitter usernames are essentially keywords used for these applications built on the Twitter […]
Glad to see you realized this before going hog-wild with these twitter bots. The urban dictionary bot is a nice proof-of-concent, but the way it functions now is un-usable - a 5 minute delay? Where’s the convenience in that? I bet I could get a quicker response from my human followers. The direct message API is ripe for web-services possibilities - if this request is honored.
Excellent request Steve!
we have the same need for a service we’re currently developing. We saw that there is an url to do this, and we were thinking about calling it directly from time to time (http://twitter.com/followers/befriend_all) but sure, asking twitter directly is a lot more clever, thanks