Frequently Asked Questions

Why TLists? 

There is a ton of great content on Twitter, but it's often hard to find what you are looking for. Our goal is to help you easily find and follow the best Tweeters and Twitter Lists on any possible topic. The TLists API provides a variety of methods, including searching by keyword and browsing by category.

What makes TLists different from other Twitter search engines and directories?

We obsess over the quality of our content, and we use a mix of human editors, algorithms, and data sources to deliver the most relevant results possible. For example, our list search not only scans the names and descriptions of each lists, but also the recent tweets and profiles of every list member. Our list directory is maintained by expert human editors, and thus we maintain higher quality standards than other directories. 

Who else is using the API? 

Our heaviest users are currently apps such as Tweetdeck and Twittelator. Let us know if you'd like to be listed here too.

How scalable and stable is the API? Can you handle requests directly from clients?

The API is stable and it scales to handle significant load. Since it requires no access key, it is ideal for calling directly from client apps. We are currently used in production by Tweetdeck and we process millions of requests per month.

How does the TLists search engine work?

While the search API (for lists and tweeters) is very simple to use, behind the scenes we're doing a lot of work. The TLists system:

• continually crawls the latest lists on Twitter
• aggregates recent tweets and user information for every list in our index
• mines the data to assemble a semantic profile of every list and tweeter 
• indexes the processed profiles in our search engine, so that for each keyword our algorithm delivers relevant results 

How do the TLists categories work? 

Our in-house editors select the appropriate categories for each list (e.g., see the categories/lists method). This data is then used to automatically derive the top users in each category (e.g., see the categories/users and categories/superlist methods).