Adam Green
Twitter API Consultant
adam@140dev.com
781-879-2960
@140dev

Lead Generation: Following signatures work best with opposing camps of users

February 2, 2014

My last post on lead generation introduced the idea of a follow signature. This is a technique that allows you to rank a user’s interest in a subject by counting the number of experts they follow. This method is especially accurate when dealing with a set of users who hold opposing views. For example, how […]

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Lead Generation: Automating quality control using a follow signature

February 2, 2014

As I said in the previous post on lead generation, it’s easy to find thousands of leads for any subject on Twitter. Assuring the quality of these accounts, however, is a time consuming task. What is also needed is an automated test that will filter out the highest quality leads. An effective signature is a […]

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Lead Generation: Following list is better source than followers

February 2, 2014

When compiling a list of prospective Twitter leads for any subject area, an obvious approach is to find accounts that tweet about that subject. This can be done with the streaming API or REST API. This still leaves a lot of curating work to select the highest quality accounts from this group. A valuable shortcut […]

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Google Hangouts for streaming API code?

January 31, 2014

I’d like to start working on a book on the streaming API, but I’ve learned that actually walking people through code and installs is best before writing it all down. I’m learning a lot about where the sticking points are by helping people install the new version of the framework. It seems like running processes […]

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Three most important rules for running the streaming API framework

January 31, 2014

I’m a typical programmer when it comes to reading documentation before I try to run someone else’s code. First I try to run the code, then I read the docs. Hey, if I needed clear documentation to get things working, would I have become a Twitter API programmer? Unfortunately, Twitter’s streaming API requires a unique […]

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Streaming API: Automated restart when tweet collection fails

January 30, 2014

The streaming API is pretty amazing when you start seeing all that free data pouring into a database, but sadly the connection is not completely stable. I typically see a failure at least every couple of months. It’s hard to be sure what causes the failure. It could be the Phirehose library that talks to […]

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The full streaming API stack

January 29, 2014

I’ve been spending the last few days helping people install the latest version of the streaming API framework. This has reminded me of how many moving parts there are, and how this can get in the way of building a mental model of what is actually going on. One of the biggest confusions seems to […]

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Extending the streaming API framework

January 29, 2014

One of my primary goals for this codebase has always been pedagogical. I thought of it as a set of training wheels for the streaming API. The number of moving parts is so great with the streaming API that getting data flowing from the API to a database using just the official docs is a […]

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Conversion strategy for the new streaming API framework

January 14, 2014

I’ve been getting emails from people asking for advice on making the switch to the 0.30 version of this code. First of all, there is only one database change that you must make before running the new code. You have to add a new is_rt (tinyint) field to the tweets table  to flag retweets. This […]

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Beta test of new 140dev streaming API framework is ready

January 13, 2014

Update: This code has now been put into production. You can get the latest copy here. The last few upgrades of this code were purely for compatibility with internal changes in the streaming API, so I wanted to give people code that didn’t require any changes to their own programming. Those upgrades seem to have […]

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Upgrade Phirehose now for continued streaming API access

December 29, 2013

Twitter is upgrading the streaming API on January, 6th to require http 1.1 connections. This will break the Phirehose library that manages the API connection in my 140dev streaming API framework. If you’re running this framework code, it’s essential that you replace your copy of Phirehose in the next week or tweet collection will stop. […]

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Editing tweets will be impossible

December 17, 2013

The idea is floating around that Twitter will allow users to edit their tweets, possibly for a limited period of time. I agree with the desire for this feature, but it won’t work. Once a tweet is published, copies of it are delivered in real-time to thousands of data collection scripts capturing tweets with the […]

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