Overview of Twitter API Nathan Liu

Twitter API Essentials Twitter API is a Representational State Transfer(REST) style web services exposed over HTTP(S). Can be accessed with any HTTP client using either GET(accessor) and POST(mutator) methods. Examples: – Getting a users profile – Retrieving a users latest tweets – Search for all tweets containing the term twitter

Method Categories Account: authentication Block: blocking and unblock users Direct message: managing messages sent between pairs of users Favorites: getting and setting favorite tweets of users. Friendship: checking if two users and following each other. Social graph: getting follower and friends. Status: retrieve, post, delete tweets Timeline: retrieve latest collection of tweets Trends: retrieve trending topics Users: getting and setting user details.

Three Major APIs REST API: access to core data about individual users, update and retrieve timelines, status data. Most used for building Search API: retrieving tweets with constrains on keyword, locations, time. Streaming API: receiving real time feed for access large scale tweet stream. Can filter with keywords, user lists, locations.

Working with Twitter API Results are returned in JSON, XML or RSS format. Documentation: – Client libraries available in many different languages: – Each free account can make a maximum of 150 requests per hour. A web console for you to try out different methods: – A very good python package is Tweepy ( which supports all three APIs.

Example 1: Working with Tweepy auth = tweepy.BasicAuthHandler("username", "password") api = tweepy.API(auth) auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler("consumer_key", "consumer_secret") # Redirect user to Twitter to authorize redirect_user(auth.get_authorization_url()) # Get access token auth.get_access_token("verifier_value") # Construct the API instance api = tweepy.API(auth) # Iterate through all of the authenticated user's friends for friend in tweepy.Cursor(api.friends).items(): # Process the friend here process_friend(friend) # Iterate through the first 200 statuses in the friends timeline for status in tweepy.Cursor(api.friends_timeline).items(200): # Process the status here process_status(status) # follow every follower of the authenticated user for follower in tweepy.Cursor(api.followers).items(): follower.follow()

Example 2: Listen for All Tweets Containing Obama from tweepy.streaming import StreamListener, Stream class Listener ( StreamListener ): def on_status( self, status ): print '-' * 20 print status.text return if __name__ == "__main__": USERNAME = "YourUsernameHere" PASSWORD = "YourPasswordHere" listener = Listener() stream = Stream( USERNAME, PASSWORD, listener ); stream.filter( track=( "obama", ) )