Data: Twitter

Twitter is a social networking site that allows you to send updates in 140 characters or less. Twitter has 200 million of people as of 2011, and users post 50 million of tweets per day.

Twitter also allows users and developers to access to that corpus of data, via APIs (https://dev.twitter.com/):

Search API:

This API allows the developer to find tweets with specific keywords, find tweets from a user, or find tweets that are referencing a specific user.

REST API:

This API allows the developer to build applications that leverage Twitter. Is allows to post tweets, reply to tweets, favorite certain tweets, retweet other tweets, access timelines, status updates, and user information.

Streaming API:

Developers that need to data intensive access can use this API. This API is useful for people that are interested in building a data mining product or are interested in analytics research. It allows for large quantities of keywords

to be specified and tracked, retreiving geo-tagged tweets from a certain region, or have the public statuses of a user set returned.

Twitter also provides an Advanced Search website that allows us to query their database directly (http://twitter.com/#!/search-advanced).

We can use Twitter APIs or the advanced search in order to access thousands of tweets every day, and analyze the information that users are posting. Text visualization is very important in order to make sense of all the data that is provided.