A suite of Twitter measurements based on our ever-growing 1.6 billion tweet, 55 million user data set.
All queries for a specific user can be done using the param screen_name OR user_id. All queries also allow the callback parameter which is available to enable queries using JSONP and used primarily with JavaScript.
Twitter is a culture unto itself complete with its own jargon. Here we define some of the terms used in the documentation for the various Twitter-related queries
Anyone can sign up for a free account on Twitter and many people have. Each user has a screen name (@infochimps) they choose and a unique user ID (15748351) assigned by Twitter (how to find yours).
Users write (140-character max!) tweets about anything and everything and they can choose to follow other users whose tweets they want to read. Users you follow are your friends and users who follow you are your followers.
Twitter is very open and you typically don’t have to know/follow/friend someone to read their tweets. Users can also protect their accounts, limiting their tweets to only those they themselves follow, essentially excluding themselves from the global Twitter conversation.
Twitter did something remarkable: it let its users their own culture through their usage of the Twitter platform. In return for this freedom, the Twitterati have established the following cultural mores for tweeting
Twitter users can reply to each other by starting a tweet with an @-sign and the name of another user:
@dataspora has excellent writeup on Big Data’s incipient tipping point: http://bit.ly/bigdata
Users can also retweet each other’s tweets by starting a tweet with the letters RT, amplifying messages across the whole of Twitter:
RT @infochimps Fellow chimps! Your challenge this week: find a dataset even more fun than http://bit.ly/callstella and add it to infochimps.org
Users can also mention each other by simply including a screename preceded by an @-sign in a tweet:
Datum: many primate tribes are matriarchal. @silona @skud Thx!