Mahdi Taghizadeh I'm who I'm!

Create a Twitter API proxy for your own!

As you may know I live in Iran and many websites are blocked here due to governmental censorship policies. Therefor, to access websites like Facebook or Twitter we have to use proxies or VPNs. Proxies and VPNs have their own problems here and are not reliable solutions indeed. The issue becomes more complicated when it comes to mobile phone world; for example to access Twitter on my iPhone I have to connect to my VPN first and then open my Twitter client and it's really exhausting and painful!

Yesterday, that Twitter announced official "Twitter for iPhone", I received an update on my iPhone that replaced Tweetie 2 with the new official app and as soon as I opened the new app it asked for my Twitter username and password; one interesting point which I noticed was a proxy setting section that let users use a different proxy API other than Twitter official API. Soon after this, Pedram came up with a solution in his mind! His suggesting solution was twip. twip stands for Twitter + Proxy + PHP and is a free Twitter API proxy in PHP that let you create your very own proxy API on your desired domain name and use it instead of Twitter original API. In my case it was great because I could use it in on my iPhone and now I'm able to read tweets and update it without a VPN!

All you need to setup your proxy API on your domain are

1. apache with mod_rewrite enabled
2. >=PHP-5.2.4 with curl enabled (it may work with <5.2.4, but I only tested it on 5.2.4 :-) )
3. zlib support if you want the gzip compression work

Then you should download twip and extract it in a folder on your web server (even root) and define it as your proxy API in Twitter for iPhone (or any other application which supports proxy API settings). At least you get rid of Twitter censorship in countries like Iran! I wish same solutions for Facebook, etc. ;-)

After setting this up successfully, I was thinking if there is any desktop Twitter client with the same functionality (to let the end user set his own proxy API) but unfortunately didn't find anything. So, do you know any? Tell me in the comments!

UPDATE: Thanks (!) to our friends at Google Code which have blocked all Iranian IPs, you have to use a proxy or VPN to download Twip from Iran! So I uploaded both available versions of Twip here. Go get it!