July 11th, 2009
Expand Your Twitter Network With Ruby
Have any basic idea of OOP? No? Then, don’t bother reading.
Twitter is a place to have fun, stay updated and connect with friends of friends. Growing your network on Twitter now is becoming a little tougher than earlier. All thanks to bots and spammer 
You know, they are the spoilsports found everywhere.
Anyways, I found something interesting on Jerod Santo’s blog. A way to expand you Twitter network with Ruby. This Ruby (program) generates a list of people highly followed by our friends.
The Flow
- Fetch the ids of all the people you follow
- Use those ids to fetch the ids of all the people they follow
- Remove any ids in both groups
- Tally the occurrences of each unique id in the list
- Sort them by most occurrences
- Iterate the top 10 and print the user information
The Script
require 'rubygems'
require 'twitter'
base = Twitter::Base.new(Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('username', 'password'))
my_friends = base.friend_ids
candidates = my_friends.inject(Array.new) { |array,id| array += Twitter.friend_ids(id); array }
candidates -= my_friends
tallied = candidates.inject(Hash.new(0)) { |hash, can| hash[can] += 1; hash }
ordered = tallied.sort { |x,y| y[1] <=> x[1] }
ordered[0..9].each do |array|
user = base.user(array[0])
puts "#{user.screen_name} is followed by #{array[1]} of the people you follow."
end
P.S I am not a Ruby programmer.
P.S.S You can follow me on Twitter. Click here here to do so. 
July 18th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Hi Joel-
Glad you liked my Ruby script! If you enjoyed that one, you might also want to check out this script with a similar purpose:
See Which Twitterers Don’t Follow You Back With Ruby
July 29th, 2009 at 3:40 am
Hi, I was just browsing through all the partner’s pages whom i exchanged links with and found mine missing on yours. Tech-Hut (http://tech-hutblog.blogspot.com) Do you want to discontinue link exchange?