Mining the Social Web, 2nd Edition

Part II. Twitter Cookbook

Whereas Part I of this book featured a number of social web properties in a somewhat broadly guided tour, the remaining chapter of this book comes back full circle to where we started in Part I with Twitter. It is organized as a cookbook and features more than two dozen bite-sized recipes for mining Twitter data. Twitter’s accessible APIs, inherent openness, and rampant worldwide popularity make it an ideal social website to zoom in on, and this part of the book aims to create some atomic building blocks that are highly composable to serve a wide variety of purposes.

Just like any other technical cookbook, these recipes are organized in an easy-to-navigate problem/solution format, and as you are working through them, you are sure to come up with interesting ideas that involve tweaks and modifications. Whereas Part I provided a fairly broad overview of many social web properties, Part II is designed to narrow the focus on a common set of small problems and present some patterns that you can adapt to other social web properties.

You are highly encouraged to have as much fun with these recipes as possible, and as you come up with any clever recipes of your own, consider sharing them back with the book’s community by sending a pull request to its GitHub repository, tweeting about it (mention @SocialWebMining if you want a retweet), or posting about it on Mining the Social Web’s Facebook page.