Question

Using MVC4, I would like to get the recent Tweets (3) of user’s without having to request access from them, because that is a pain for the user. This is also because a user may be viewing another user and I would also like to display their Tweets.

This was fairly simple with Twitter API v1:

$.ajax({
   url: 'https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?count=3&screen_name=' +   twitterUser,
   ...
});

..but its deprecated and will stop working in about two months from now.

I’m new to Oauth and have struggled to find any good material on how to get a user’s Tweets, but I believe the process is a lot more complicated now with the Twitter API v1.1? Ideally, I’d like to achieve everthing in the front end, but think that I now need to do some authentication server side and will have to use MVC?

In order to get any user’s Tweets, I was thinking that I could create a Twitter account for my application and use that to get anyone’s Tweets, as long as they are not protected.

Does anyone know of any good libraries that I can use to achieve this, or is the out of the box MVC4 Oauth stuff alone enough to do the job?

Any suggestions of where to start, and especially examples would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I decided to use Linq2Twitter, as this makes use of the V1.1 API.

An MVCDemo example of Linq2Twitter stores the authorised credentials in a SessionStateCredentials object, but I can store the object in cache and persist the authorisation for all users, meaning they won’t have to authorise anything. Provided that a user’s Tweets aren’t protected, the Tweet's for any user should be retrievable this way.