My First Look into the Twitter API

On April 16, the day that I got my first Twitter account (@RaymondSison), I began to look into how you can grab tweets from a Twitter stream of interest. On Yahoo, I searched on "saving Tweets to XML".

This led me to some interesting info at the following blog entry by Anthony Grace, "Twitter - Saving your Tweets", at
http://www.codersbarn.com/post/2009/12/19/Twitter-Saving-your-Tweets.aspx

The author writes the following (and I followed his instructions by using my first Twitter account @RaymondSison):

Recently, I passed the 700 tweet mark and decided to archive what I had. 

But how? I gleaned the following tidbits from "Twitter Tips, Tricks, and Tweets" by Paul McFedries - founder and CEO of Mashable. You can save a local copy of your tweets by entering the following URL in your browser: 

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/account.xml?count=n 

where account = your account name, and 

n = number of tweets 

This will open n number of your tweets to date in XML in your browser.

When I did this with my own Twitter account, using http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/RaymondSison.xml?count=n I got the following XML for my one and only tweet "Hello World" (from Fort Worth, TX)--and this gave me some new insight in how to get raw tweet data that we can further process as desired.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

- <statuses type="array">

- <status>

  <created_at>Sat Apr 16 22:32:10 +0000 2011</created_at>

  <id>59383607944417280</id>

  <text>Hello World!</text>

  <source>web</source>

  <truncated>false</truncated>

  <favorited>false</favorited>

  <in_reply_to_status_id />

  <in_reply_to_user_id />

  <in_reply_to_screen_name />

  <retweet_count>0</retweet_count>

  <retweeted>false</retweeted>

- <user>

  <id>283239611</id>

  <name>Raymond Sison</name>

  <screen_name>RaymondSison</screen_name>

  <location />

  <description />

<profile_image_url>http://a1.twimg.com/sticky/default_profile_images/default

_profile_4_normal.png</profile_image_url>

  <url />

  <protected>false</protected>

  <followers_count>0</followers_count>

  <profile_background_color>C0DEED</profile_background_color>

  <profile_text_color>333333</profile_text_color>

  <profile_link_color>0084B4</profile_link_color>

  <profile_sidebar_fill_color>DDEEF6</profile_sidebar_fill_color>

  <profile_sidebar_border_color>C0DEED</profile_sidebar_border_color>

  <friends_count>2</friends_count>

  <created_at>Sat Apr 16 21:59:05 +0000 2011</created_at>

  <favourites_count>0</favourites_count>

  <utc_offset />

  <time_zone />

<profile_background_image_url>http://a3.twimg.com/a/1302724321/images/themes

/theme1/bg.png</profile_background_image_url>

  <profile_background_tile>false</profile_background_tile>

  <profile_use_background_image>true</profile_use_background_image>

  <notifications />

  <geo_enabled>true</geo_enabled>

  <verified>false</verified>

  <following />

  <statuses_count>1</statuses_count>

  <lang>en</lang>

  <contributors_enabled>false</contributors_enabled>

  <follow_request_sent />

  <listed_count>0</listed_count>

  <show_all_inline_media>false</show_all_inline_media>

  <default_profile>true</default_profile>

  <default_profile_image>true</default_profile_image>

  <is_translator>false</is_translator>

  </user>

  <geo />

  <coordinates />

- <place xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss">

  <id>42e46bc3663a4b5f</id>

  <name>Fort Worth</name>

  <full_name>Fort Worth, TX</full_name>

  <place_type>city</place_type>

  <url>http://api.twitter.com/1/geo/id/42e46bc3663a4b5f.json</url>

  <attributes />

- <bounding_box>

  <georss:polygon>32.551584 -97.549053 32.551584 -97.033715 33.047463

-97.033715 33.047463 -97.549053</georss:polygon>

  </bounding_box>

  <country code="US">United States</country>

  </place>

  <contributors />

  </status>

  </statuses>