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

Cool new Twitter widget

April 8, 2012

We’ve been working a new site called TwitChimp for a client, and while it’s still in beta, the widget we just finished for it is worth trying out. TwitChimp lets you create lists of up to 100 Twitter accounts and share them either on your own site with a widget, such as the one below, […]

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Initial impressions of Rackspace’s cloud servers

February 20, 2012

I have a bad habit acquired from my years as a Dot Com CTO. When the time comes to pick a server for a new project, I always overbuy. I’d rather pay a hundred dollars more per month then have a server that can’t take the load. One of the driving forces behind this decision […]

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Dealing with tweet bursts

January 27, 2012

This week we got crushed by the State of the Union speech. We normally get about 30,000 to 50,000 tweets per day in the 2012twit.com database, and our largest server can handle that without any showing any appreciable load. During the SOTU tweet volume exploded. We got 500,000 tweets in about 4 hours. I was […]

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Screening a tweet stream for quality control

January 20, 2012

We’ve been working on a college football recruiting site called DirectSnap.com for a couple of months, and the most interesting aspect of the technology behind this site is the quality control algorithm I had to develop. Most of the tweet streams we work on, such as 2012twit.com, are based on collecting tweets for either a […]

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Exceeding the search API rate limit

December 10, 2011

We recently built a cool site called This R That for a client. Besides having a great UI that my son, Zach, built, it also has a neat architecture for a Twitter search site. The major weakness of the Twitter search API is that rate limiting is based on the IP making the request. While […]

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Dealing with 500 errors when retrieving user data

November 24, 2011

I got a call the other day from a developer who was receiving various 500 series errors when trying to gather large amounts of Twitter user data. The API has a number of errors in the 500 range, all of which generally mean that the Twitter servers are overloaded. The API is built on the […]

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Collecting #OWS tweets with the 140dev framework

October 24, 2011

Our work with Twitter and politics has now moved beyond the 2012 election. We just set up a tweet collection database to track the Occupy Wall Street movement. It uses the 140dev framework to collect all tweets containing #ows, #occupy, and #occupywalllstreet. This will be used to document our tools and methodology to automate a […]

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Primer for Automated Twitter Engagement

October 18, 2011

A lot of my Twitter consulting for clients has involved automating the process of Twitter engagement. Now I’m finally documenting this as part of the Twitter politics work I’m doing with my son. We are building up a political account called @4more, and writing up the whole process on our 140elect.com blog.

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Download the latest version of Phirehose

September 30, 2011

Twitter has finally converted the Streaming API over to SSL connections only. This means that your copy of the 140dev Framework will stopping connecting until you upgrade to the latest version of the Phirehose library. You can do this in two ways. You can either download the entire 140dev Framework file for the DB Server […]

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SocStudies.com: A new approach to college study with Twitter

September 1, 2011

The thing I find so great about doing Twitter consulting is the wide range of vertical applications that are completely open for new development. One of them is higher level education. We’ve just launched a new site called Social Studies that applies the techniques of tweet aggregation to help students study collectively. This work was […]

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2012twit.com has launched

March 8, 2011

I’ve been quiet here for the last couple of months as I’ve worked on a new Twitter dashboard for the 2012 presidential election. We launched it last night at http://2012twit.com, and I’m very pleased with the result. This will be a lot of fun. I’ll be blogging here about development issues related to the site. […]

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Automatic restarting of stream connection

February 5, 2011

The 2012 candidate system is going to need a more fault tolerant collection system. Since the Egyptian protest started Twitter has been even more unreliable, and this is affecting the connection to the streaming API. I use a monitoring system to warn me when tweet collection has stopped, but it hasn’t been necessary in the […]

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