Getting started with Twitter APIs

Twitter is as much a delight for tweeple (people using Twitter to tweet) as it is for data scientists. The APIs and the documentation are well updated and easy to use. Let us get started with the APIs.

Overview

Twitter has one of easiest yet most powerful set of APIs available of any social network out there. These APIs have been used by Twitter itself and data scientists to understand the dynamics of the Twitter world. Twitter APIs make use of four different objects, namely:

  • Tweets: A tweet is the central entity that defines Twitter itself. As discussed in the previous section, a tweet contains far more information (metadata) than just the content/message of the tweet.
  • Users: Anybody or anything that can tweet, follow, ...

Get R: Unleash Machine Learning Techniques now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.