Reputation: 35
I've got a bunch of free online HTML, CSS, and JS tutorials under my belt and I want to try using them to make a browser extension. But I want to make sure that the data I want to use is actually accessible before getting started.
My goal is to make a browser extension for twitter.com that shows the number of impressions of any tweet next to the likes, retweets, and replies. My basic idea is to get the status URL of any given tweet, poll the Twitter API for the number of impressions of that tweet, store that in a variable, and then use CSS to display a little eye icon and the number stored in the impressions variable.
I know that I can find the number of impressions of all of my tweets, both through Twitter Analytics, and also just going to my profile page and clicking the little bar chart icon next to views, retweets, etc. But I'm not clear on whether I can do that for other people's tweets via Twitter's API or anything else. Can you?
For the record, I'm not too concerned about the varying definition of "impression," since it will be consistently applied across all tweets and I'm mostly interested in giving users a comparison between tweets. This is part of a research project to see how this might change how people engage with social media if they know how many views a given post has. If there's a simpler way to go about that using existing platforms, I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks for the advice!
Upvotes: 0
Views: 403
Reputation:
No, impressions data is private. If you are authenticated to the Twitter API then you can use the new Twitter Developer Labs Tweets API to get private metrics like impressions, but you cannot get that for other people's Tweets. Also, the Twitter API does not support CORS, so I don't think you'll be successful trying to use it from a browser extension.
Upvotes: 0