Question

In the email notification we can see something like

<username> followed you using <appname>.

It is great. But is there any possible way to know the application name using API?

Answer 1

I took a look through the REST API, and I could not find anything that would support this. My guess is that this is a twitter.com feature that is available in the API (yet).

The most logical places I looked were statuses/followers and friendships/show. In both cases there was nothing definitive. Checking the follower emails for my account, I found multiple followers that used applications (like PeopleBrowr and SocialOomph) to follow the account. In most cases, the source on their latest status object matched the application name used to follow me, but that was definitely not a sure thing.

So, to answer your question directly, no I don’t think it can be done through the API (not unless there’s an undocumented method out there that does this.)

I can, however, think of a way to get that info. One approach would be to set up the email account receiving the follow notifications to forward a copy to a mailbox that is checked by an automated process. When emails show up, parse them to find the app name used to follow you.

I used the following regular expression (in C#) to find the application’s name and URI in the email’s body:

Match m = Regex.Match(input, @"followed you using\s*<a[^""]+""(?<appUri>[^""]+)""[^>]+>(?<appName>\w*)</a>");

I used m.Groups["appName"].Value to pull out the application name, and m.Groups["appUri"].Value to pull out the URI from the match.

In order to tie the app info to a user, I had to also find the screen name with:

Match m = Regex.Match(user, @"\(@<a[^>]+>(?<screenName>\w*)</a>\) is now following");

I used m.Groups["screenName"].Value to extract the value from the match.