Get recent twitter followers using Twitter4j

Hi,

In the previous blog we saw how to fetch twitter users based on some search criteria using the Twitter4j library, a java wrapper available for Twitter API calls.

In the same grails project, i had the requirement to display the recent twitter followers of authenticated twitter accounts. Twitter4j library provides a way to get the IDs of twitter followers in the ordered way, which can further be used to get the information of the latest followers. It helped me a lot to make quick list of user’s recent followers on twitter.

Twitter API needs to have twitter account access_token and access_secret, which we obtains after authorizing/connecting twitter account with the application as mentioned in this blog.

Code to fetch recent twitter followers:-

[java]

TwitterFactory factory = new TwitterFactory()
Twitter twitter = factory.getInstance()
twitter.setOAuthConsumer(consumerKey, consumerSecret)
AccessToken accessToken = new AccessToken(twitterToken, twitterSecret)
twitter.setOAuthAccessToken(accessToken)
String twitterScreenName = twitter.getScreenName()
IDs followerIDs = twitter.getFollowersIDs(twitterScreenName, -1)
List<Integer> followerIdList = followerIDs.IDs
if (followerIdList?.size() > 0) {
int numberOfFollowers = Math.min(followerIdList.size(), 20)
followerIdList = followerIdList.subList(0, numberOfFollowers)
followerIdList.each {
twitter4j.User user = twitter.showUser(it)
println("Name: ${user.screenName}")
println("Location: ${user.location}")
}
}

[/java]

This code will fetch the recent 20 followers from the user’s twitter account.

Hope this helps.