Implement in social Digging data from twitter

Main Idea:

As we learn from the course, I find it is very interesting to these field and I find maybe we could also get our own data and try to implement these technology we learned to analyze our mind by using data we pushed on the social media .

Before we make our mind to handle these technical strategy get the information and learn from the social network. The first important thing is to get data from the server. We could not do anything unless we could get the data we published on the Internet.

Twitter is a good platform which not only have a lot of user and data but also have a great support for developers to get these data from their service. Twitter is a massive social networking site tuned towards fast communication. More than 140 million active users publish over 400 million 140-character “Tweets” every day. Twitter’s speed and ease of publication have made it an important communication medium for people from all walks of life. Twitter has played a prominent role in socio-political events, such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Twitter has also been used to post damage reports and disaster preparedness information during large natural disasters, such as the Hurricane Sandy. So that we could implement our idea based on these data. Twitter provide many API which let us to send our request and get almost every data we want from the server. It’s a good platform for me to take a first step in the social network analysis and collect data is also the basic of analysis.

Using OAuth to get the authority:

OAuth is an open standard to authorization. OAuth provides client applications a ‘secure delegated access' to server resources on behalf of a resource owner. It specifies a process for resource owners to authorize third-party access to their server resources without sharing their credentials. Designed specifically to work with Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), OAuth essentially allows access tokens to be issued to third-party clients by an authorization server, with the approval of the resource owner, or end-user. The client then uses the access token to access the protected resources hosted by the resource server. OAuth is commonly used as a way for web surfers to log into third party web sites using their Google, Facebook or Twitter accounts, without worrying about their access credentials being compromised.

Therefore, OAuth is the first step to get an authorization to use the Rest API to get the data.

Using REST API to collect the data:

The REST APIs provides programmatic access to read and write Twitter data. Author a new Tweet, read author profile and follower data, and more. The REST API identifies Twitter applications and users using OAuth, responses are available in JSON.

For example: one of the API we could use

GET statues/usr_timeline

Returns a collection of the most recent Tweets posted by the user indicated by the screen_name or user_id parameters.

User timelines belonging to protected users may only be requested when the authenticated user either “owns” the timeline or is an approved follower of the owner.

The timeline returned is the equivalent of the one seen when you view a user’s profile on twitter.com.

Test--get Avril Lavignes's tweets from twitter by using these tech:

Next step:

1. Get more detail about twitter API and get more info and then try to mining the useful data from it.
2. Learning some necessary knowledge about JS to handle the JSON data.
3. Try to learn some NLP algorithm in Python and take some practice
4. Plan further and get read some API documents from other platform such as Facebook or Weibo.