Twitter Batch Search
November 7th, 2007 by Ade OlonohI was searching Twitter a few days ago, looking for people I know that might be twittering. I was surprised to find out that there was no mechanism to perform a batch search. The only way is to give Twitter your GMail username and password so it can search your contacts, and I’m too paranoid about security to do that.
So rather than enter in contacts one by one, I spent couple hours putting together this utility that would take a list of email addresses or names and run a batch search to find people on Twitter.
It might take a while to return results from a large list, but otherwise seems to work pretty well.
Comments and suggestions are welcome.
November 8th, 2007 at 2:36 am
Assuming you’re not harvesting email addresses, you might want to put a note to that effect on the form. Its absence explains my non-participation at this juncture.
November 8th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Great point Marc — I forget that’s not really a given. We’re definitely not harvesting email addresses. The disclaimer’s been added.
November 9th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Nice one! Will go check it out now
January 10th, 2008 at 1:30 am
Great little tool. Just wanted to let you know I Dug this for you.
Cheers!
Tracy Lee
January 10th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Thanks Tracy!
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:38 am
Just tested with 998 email addresses. Worked like a charm and found a few friends I would not have thought would be on Twitter.
April 28th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Hi, clearly I’m doing something gormless but I just tried this and it failed to find accounts for a number of people I know to be Twitter users. I double checked using my own e-mail address as above and again no result.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Does not appear to be working. Tried it with my 2 of my email addresses for 2 Twitter accounts and it didn’t find either. Any idea why this utility is broke?
June 18th, 2008 at 9:54 am
@Guy If those email addresses don’t work in the normal Twitter search then they won’t work in TwitterWho. It probably has to do with your Twitter profile settings.
June 27th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
After doing several, often convoluted & labyrinthine searches to put my contacts (of whom I KNOW many have Twitter accounts), my Twitter account still insists that I a) have no friends and b) if I have any friends, they’re not on Twitter.
I do not see why people are so in love with this applictaion/idea. I hate it. It has been nothing save for frustrating.