Thread

Hi there,

I was just wondering what the legality of using Twitter Timeline is?
This question might not even be relevant if the plugin works in a certain way in which case please do feel free to tell me to shush 😉

What I mean is that let’s say that you ask to follow someone who has protected their twitter feed. They allow you to follow and then you go and use the plugin to show their twitter feed on your site. Is that okay to do as then you would be letting anyone else who wants to see the feed see it even though they aren’t allowed to.

As said above this might be a daft question anyway if the plugin doesn’t allow that sort of thing anyway? I just wasn’t sure from looking at the documentation as to whether or not it honours the ‘private’ status of people’s feeds or not?

Any information on this would be great thanks.

Best wishes,

Mark

It’s not possible with the plugin, but the twitter api allows it (so I assume it’s legal as long as you don’t get caught 😛 ).

The plugin uses this url:

<a href="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml">http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml</a>    user can also be friends or public

It would be trivial to change it:

<a href="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/markbowen.xml">http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/markbowen.xml</a>

Which would allow me to get your timeline (assuming of course that I’m following you, since it does make you authenticate).

Ah so you can’t show details of a person that had to allow you to view their feed with the plugin then?

What about people who you are just following? Obviously anyone else could follow them if they wished but just wondering morally in this case then should you be showing other peoples feeds on your own site?

Best wishes,

Mark

Let me simplify - through the twitter api, you can get any timeline that your account can view on twitter.

But with the plugin you can only get your own tweets, a mash-up of all your friends’ tweets, or the public timeline.

Make sense?

Personally, I would prefer not to have my feed posted on other sites.  But since it’s public on twitter, I wouldn’t make a big fuss.

Hiya,

Yep I think I get that but what I meant was that say using the mash-up of friends’ tweets I have two friends who had to allow me to follow them :

1 - Will the plugin show those posts &
2 - If the plugin does show the posts am I right to do so?

Sorry I’m probably not understanding fully as I’m quite new to twitter. Just a chick myself 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

So who you stalking now Mark?

So who you stalking now Mark?

Darn he found me!! 😉

Thought it would take longer than that!!

In all seriousness though no-one. Was just wondering if the plugin did show results that you yourself had to be allowed to see then if you then placed this timeline on your site would you be going against some rules somewhere.

Best wishes,

Mark

Mark,

Why don’t you test it and see if it show’s your friend’s private tweets?  Even if it does, I think it’s less a legality issue and more a courtesy issue.

Mark,

Why don’t you test it and see if it show’s your friend’s private tweets?  Even if it does, I think it’s less a legality issue and more a courtesy issue.

Normally I would test yep but I suppose I was being 50% lazy as I had the legal / moral question anyway 😉

I personally would only ever show my own tweets on my own site but a client had asked about this so I just thought I’d ask here as people are very in the know here 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

Mark,

If you have friends that have protected tweets and you are following them they will show on your site… I was wondering the same thing so I created a new Twitter account and followed the new account and sure enough the protected account tweets were showing on my site. I have seen a nice plugin for wordpress that would check the email of the user on the site and then see if they were following that protected user and only display the protected content if that user was also following the protected user. This to me is way more involved then it needs to be and is limited to pages where the user needs to be logged in to check against the email address. I personally just display my own tweets.