Twitter cursors

Question

Make the page "cursors" on Twitter api change. I mean, if the cursor ID for the second page of results was 123456789, will it still be the same every time or will it change.

For example, if

http://api.twitter.com/1/followers/ids.json&screen_name=XXXXXXX&cursor=123456789

returns followers X, Y, Z for user XXXXXXX, will always return X, Y, Z (assuming that X, Y, Z still follow this user)

Answer 1

Cursors essentially do not change.

The cursor is opaque to the Btree tolerance-free index using the change time. This brings you to a point in time in the reverse loop of a sorted list. So, since you cannot change the past except to erase it, it is effectively stable. (Bubble modifications up.) But you have to deal with the additions to the list sheet, as well as the shrinkage of the block to delete, so your blocks begin to partially overlap with the age of the data. (If you cache the cursors and read much later, you will see the first few lines of the cursor block [n + 1] as duplicates of the last lines of the cursor block [n]. The power of the intersections is equal to the number of deletions in the cursor [n]). However, be valuable when caching these cursors and then heuristically rebalance them when the proportion of the intersection crosses a threshold.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/twitter-development-talk/cStHZQKNUnw/1ucp0gfwWvAJ