breaking up with BK & RESTful APIs with curl

This article sparked a mini-firestorm on BrightKite. As a couple of the comments at the end of the story mention, several users were apparently deleted from BrightKite due to their negative reactions to this story. There was also a number of users that were deleted because of some kind of AT&T-related "removal" notifications, but some users who were deleted did not use AT&T. In the end BrightKite fucked up yet again.

I am finally getting around to deleting my BrightKite account. For some reason all of my pixelpipe posts have been failing to Twitter but succeeding on BK, so people have actually been commenting on my BK account recently. I've also been getting some strange "love spam" through BK, which is yet another lesson in why this new BK 2.0 sucks: there is no "report" button for posts or users, so I can't flag something as spam. Wonderful new system, guys.

So anyway, this was a nice quick introduction to working with RESTful APIs with curl. I found one example of how to delete all brightkite posts and decided a bash one-liner would be simpler. This page describes how to specify the method and other REST-related options using curl. Here is the one-liner I ended up using:

curl -s -G -u user:pass http://brightkite.com/people/user/objects.xml | \
 grep "<id>" | sed -e 's/^.*<id>\(.\+\)<\/.*$/\1/g' | \
 xargs -n 1 -I {} curl -s -G -u user:pass -X DELETE http://brightkite.com/objects/{}.xml

Of course, being BrightKite it doesn't work the way it should. Only a small amount of posts get deleted at a time, I don't know why. Intermittently you'll receive a spam of HTML 404 pages, and every single request (authenticated or not) gives a '403 Forbidden' error. No matter; running the one-liner over and over gets them all eventually.

When i'm done i'll post a couple about how BK sucks, and not delete the account outright: I want my opinions of their suckitude to linger for others to discover. It's pretty sad, too: BK actually worked in the beginning and was pretty useful when the few other users down here used it frequently.