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

The coming Twitter land rush

July 12, 2012

“We want developers to be able to build applications that run within Tweets.” – @Sippey post on changes to Twitter API I’ve been through the usual round of emotions in reaction to one of Twitter’s periodic “adjustments” to the Twitter API access rules. Denial and anger took a few days. I tried bargaining with my […]

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How is Twitter programming better than Twitter search?

June 8, 2012

This is a question I frequently get asked by new clients. They know there is a Twitter API available to collect tweets, but they have no idea how the results differ from just asking for tweets with Search.Twitter.com. I’ve recently explained the fact that a tweet database lets you create a long-term store that cannot […]

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Go with the flow when creating a tweet collection database

June 7, 2012

When new Twitter consulting clients ask me to plan a tweet collection database, the first question they always ask is how much it will cost. I can give them a rough estimate for the cost of my programming time based on their desired features, but it is impossible to know how much server power they […]

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Twitter Consulting Tip: Twitter is people

June 2, 2012

Lots of people ask us to build databases of tweets, but they seem to miss the fact that along with the tweets you can also collect an amazing database of people. Data about the people who tweet is the proverbial low hanging fruit. The Twitter API gives you the complete profile of the author of […]

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Twitter Consultant Tip: Start with Twitter API rate limits

June 1, 2012

A good Twitter consultant should start any discussion with a potential client by reviewing the Twitter API rate limits on the features they want. This is really a case of form follows function. Twitter has defined what developers should be doing through their wide range of rate limits, and you better pay attention to them […]

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Twitter Consultant Tip: Tweet data is priceless

May 31, 2012

Most of the Twitter consulting I do involves some form of tweet collection and storage in a database. Even when clients approach me with this in mind, they hardly ever realize just how valuable tweet data can be. In fact, it is priceless in the truest sense of the word, because there is no way […]

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Twitter must stop the DM spam or face collapse

May 29, 2012

YO! this guy has been spreading some really badnasty rumors about u… bit.ly/KTsPo Hello some person is posting very bad things about you… bit.ly/KYxvJ lol…OMG I’m laughing so hard at this pic of u someone found bit.ly/LIMvO I now get about 20 to 30 of these Direct Messages from people I follow on Twitter every […]

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Language detection for tweets: Part 4

May 24, 2012

There are two problems you typically want to solve with language detection for tweets. First you need to analyse the types of languages you end up with for a specific set of keywords, and determine the minimum confidence level needed to get a clean result. Then when you have that data, you can process a […]

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Language detection for tweets: Part 3

May 23, 2012

In yesterday’s installment we learned how to get the most likely language for a tweet with the detectSimple() function. We also discovered that this library sometimes fails when you get down to just 2 or 3 words. The Text_LanguageDetect library has a more advanced function, called detect(), that delivers an array of possible language matches […]

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Language detection for tweets: Part 2

May 22, 2012

The docs for the Text_LanguageDetect library say that you need to pass it 4-5 sentences to get an accurate language identification, but as we saw in part 1 of this tutorial, even a single sentence seems to work. This is great, since we will need this to work with tweets that average 5-6 words. So […]

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Language detection for tweets: Part 1

May 22, 2012

One thing I learned early on in building tweet aggregation sites for clients is that they expect to only see tweets in English. After all, Google can do it, why can’t I? In theory there is a lang=en argument in the search API, but it doesn’t help much, because it only uses the language setting […]

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Simple PHP/MySQL database library source code: db_lib.php

May 15, 2012

There seems to be a good amount of interest in the new set of tutorials I’ve started writing, and most of the code I produce interacts with a MySQL database, so I’m going to post the code for my standard database library here. This makes it easy for me to link to this post multiple […]

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