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MachineElf
MachineElf

Reputation: 1281

Get public users of a service (Tumblr, Twitter)

Assuming it's not available as part of API, how can one obtain a full or partial list of public users of a web service, e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube?

Acceptable alternative: get a random public user.

I was interested in this for testing APIs with a random account. This is useful to catch edge cases when developing an app for the API; For example when developing a Tumblr theme, seeing what volumes of text/images are posted, special character use, and so on.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 49

Answers (1)

mancze
mancze

Reputation: 739

Can you even imagine a full list of (public) users of largely used web services? That's a vast load of data. I hardly believe that any API would offer that for many reasons:

  • performance/load issues,
  • data/information privacy,
  • abusing possibilities,...

For regular usage of the service's API you simply don't need that. Otherwise it would stink with some gray/black techniques.

Anyway to answer you question objectively: In order to get full or partial list of users from web service it have to provide any kind of API which would allow you to do that. So good starting point is to look at documentation, for example Twitter API, Youtube API, etc...

By swift look I don't see any method that would offer that. It might change in the future but as mentioned above I strongly doubt about that.

Another option is to mine partial list of users via search APIs or traversing the site with a robot. Also obtaining such a list is an option. However I would check whether this is even legal and not against terms of use or something like that.

Upvotes: 1

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