Transcript Overview of Twitter API

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 user’s profile
• https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?id=comp621u
– Retrieving a user’s latest tweets
• https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?id=comp621u
– Search for all tweets containing the term “twitter”
• https://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=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:
– http://dev.twitter.com/doc
• Client libraries available in many different languages:
– http://dev.twitter.com/pages/libraries
• Each free account can make a maximum of 150 requests
per hour.
• A web console for you to try out different methods:
– https://dev.twitter.com/console
• A very good python package is Tweepy
(https://github.com/joshthecoder/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", ) )