Finding Email Addresses from Twitter IDs – Google OtherMe

DEPRECATED POST – WITH THE CLOSURE OF THE GOOGLE SOCIALGRAPH API, THE RECIPE DESCRIBED HEREIN NO LONGER WORKS…

Over the weekend, I wanted to track down an email address for Leigh Dodds, but only had his twitter ID to hand. As Leigh is a Linked Data advocate, I thought there was a reasonable likelihood that a connected route from Twitter to a mailto: identifier for him might exist, so I plugged Leigh’s Twitter ID into Google’s otherme service just on the off chance.

Google otherme

The otherme lookup works for email addresses, too… So for example, guessing at the email address for Tim O’Reilly, we can identify some other locations on the web related to him…

Google other me - from email

The format for the lookup URL is:
http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/otherme?q=URL_OR_EMAILADDR

One thing this might be useful is to identify the various web presences publicly declared for an individual, and use them to augment a custom search engine built around the various people identified on a Twitter list, for example…*

*btw, @mhawksey just published a rather handy way of creating an instant “instant search” interface for a Google CSE

Read more about Google’s other me service here: Google OtherMe.

Author: Tony Hirst

I'm a Senior Lecturer at The Open University, with an interest in #opendata policy and practice, as well as general web tinkering...

3 thoughts on “Finding Email Addresses from Twitter IDs – Google OtherMe”

    1. @SHivam Yes – that’s why I put at the top of the post “DEPRECATED POST – WITH THE CLOSURE OF THE GOOGLE SOCIALGRAPH API, THE RECIPE DESCRIBED HEREIN NO LONGER WORKS… ” ;-)

      I haven’t actually looked for another way, because I’m not really that interested in email harvesting… This recipe was really just an observation I made at the time…

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