Tribe Finder [DEPRECATED]

⚠️ This project is no longer functional due to Twitter's deprecation of the v1.1 API in 2025.

This repository is archived for historical and educational purposes.

What Tribe Finder Was

Tribe Finder was a free Chrome extension that helped you discover where your Twitter friends were located around the world. Inspired by Smallworld, it provided a visual way to explore your Twitter network geographically.

How It Worked

The Core Mechanism

1. User Input: Users entered any public Twitter username (including their own)
2. Data Collection: The extension injected a content script (inject.js) that made authenticated requests to Twitter's v1.1 API endpoints:
   • friends/list.json - to fetch the user's following list (up to 5000 accounts)
   • lists/list.json - to fetch the user's Twitter Lists
   • lists/members.json - to fetch members from each list
3. Data Processing:
   • Extracted location strings from user profiles
   • Used regex-based cleaning to normalize location data
   • Geocoded cleaned locations using Mapbox's Geocoding API
   • Aggregated data by country and city
4. Storage: All data was stored locally in Chrome's chrome.storage.local for privacy
5. Display: A Next.js-based UI rendered the data as an interactive list with statistics

The API Workaround

The extension used hardcoded bearer tokens extracted from Twitter's web client to authenticate API requests without requiring users to log in. This approach worked by:

• Using Twitter's public web client bearer tokens (stored in config.bearerToken)
• Including an alternative token for rate limit fallback
• Making direct XMLHttpRequest calls to api.twitter.com/1.1 endpoints

// From inject.js
const config = {
  bearerToken: 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANRILgAAAAAAnNwIzUejRCOuH5E6I8xnZz4puTs%3D...',
  alternativeBearerToken: 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAFQODgEAAAAAVHTp76lzh3rFzcHbmHVvQxYYpTw%3D...',
  apiBaseURL: 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1',
};

Features

• City Discovery: Find cities where your Twitter community was concentrated
• Travel Planning: Identify friends to meet when traveling
• Sunshine Data: See climate information for each city
• Twitter Lists Support: Include list members in your analysis
• Privacy-First: No login required, all data stored locally
• Flexible: Analyze any public Twitter profile, not just your own

Limitations

• Only worked for public Twitter profiles
• Required at least 2 friends in a location to display it
• Only counted friends with valid location data in their profiles
• Rate-limited by Twitter's API (typically 15 requests per 15-minute window)

Why It Stopped Working

In 2023, Twitter (now X) deprecated the v1.1 API and moved to a new API structure requiring paid authentication. The bearer tokens used by the extension were invalidated, making it impossible to fetch friend and list data.

The new Twitter API:

• Requires OAuth 2.0 authentication
• Has strict rate limits on free tiers
• Charges for elevated access to endpoints like friends/list
• Makes browser-based extensions like this one economically unfeasible

Tech Stack

• Frontend: Next.js 14 (static export), React 18, TypeScript
• Styling: Tailwind CSS, Shadcn UI components
• Chrome Extension: Manifest V3, content scripts, chrome.storage API
• Forms: react-hook-form with Zod validation
• APIs: Twitter API v1.1 (deprecated), Mapbox Geocoding API

Architecture

┌─────────────────┐
│  Chrome Popup   │  (Next.js static export)
│   (index.tsx)   │
└────────┬────────┘
         │
         ├─ chrome.storage.local (data persistence)
         │
         ├─ inject.js (injected into twitter.com)
         │     │
         │     ├─ Fetches following list
         │     ├─ Fetches user lists
         │     └─ Processes & geocodes locations
         │
         └─ Mapbox Geocoding API

Local Development (Historical)

If you want to explore the code:

1. Clone the repository
2. Run bun install
3. Run bun run dev to start the development server
4. Go to chrome://extensions/ in your browser
5. Enable developer mode
6. Click on Load unpacked and select the out folder

Note: The extension will not function without valid API access.

Read More

For more context on why this project was built, see the original blog post.

License

This project is archived and provided as-is for educational purposes.