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Twitter and The Twitter Application Programming Interface (API)

Page history last edited by Dana Solomon 14 years, 1 month ago

Research Report: Twitter & The Twitter Application Programming Interface (API)

 

By Dana Solomon, @LitPlus Twitter Visualization Project

 

Abstract. Twitter is a free micro-blogging platform and social network hybrid; it allows users to post short 140-character updates, while aggregating updates posted by other users on a variety of different "timelines." These timelines operate on different scales and registers: global (entire Twitter community), personal (selected friends or "followers"), theme-based (keywords/hashtags), time-based (topics of the hour, day, week), and with the introduction of gps and locative technologies, location-based (updates within a certain radius of XYZ city). The Twitter Application Programming Interface is a defined way for developers "to make applications, websites, widgets, and other projects that interact with Twitter."

 

 

Description.  Initially envisioned as a Short Message Service (SMS) communication network designed to capitalize on the growing popularity of text messaging and mobile to mobile social networking, Twitter has grown into a hugely popular tool whose purpose and functionality continues to evolve as its population of users increases. According to the company's website, Twitter has a user base in the millions, spread throughout "nearly every country in the world."  The Twitter development team sums up the platform as "a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now."  In terms of programming and development, there are over "50,000 third-party Internet and mobile applications" that afford users the opportunity to perform a variety of tasks including the ability to embed Twitter functions within their personal websites or "tweet" directly from their mobile phone.  

 

Though its population of users has grown dramatically since its original release in 2006, Twitter has maintained its unique characteristics, most notably the 140-character limit.  The 140-character limit was originally imposed for compatibility with SMS message length protocols. Apart from becoming a trademark of the platform, the micro-update has further encouraged the proliferation of mobile-based shorthand throughout the Internet, while also keeping the website minimalist and easily navigable.  Though the development of third-party applications has given users the ability to link to longer updates, photos, music, and other multimedia content, the general interface is still quite sparse and overwhelmingly text-based, making the Twitter browsing experience quite singular as compared to other networks like Facebook or Flickr.  

 

The spread of third-party Twitter applications is due in large part to the generosity of the company's own development team, which has produced its own Application Programming Interface (API).  The Twitter API and its wiki counterpart provide users with "an API method for just about every feature you can see on [the Twitter] website."  Essentially, the Twitter API allows users to write scripts to perform tasks ranging from "search[ing] public Twitter updates programmatically," to automatically "do[ing] the sort of things a Twitter user can do."

 

Due to its generality and huge population of users, there is not one, single intended use of Twitter, in terms of a specific outlined purpose.  Its creators describe it as "an information network," one that has as many apparent uses or applications as it has users.  Twitter has been used as an alternative to other long-format blogging platforms by writers who prefer to chronicle their lives or put down their thoughts 140 characters at time.  Many news companies utilize Twitter as a constant newsfeed, providing users with updates on a huge variety of local, national, and global affairs.  Further, in the political realm, politicians, most notably President Barack Obama, have utilized Twitter as a campaign tool, while protestors have deployed the service as an organizational alternative to more widely monitored forms of communication. In the context of a literature course, it is also important to note that Twitter has been used as a stage for micro-fiction and poetry; whole novels and poems have been composed using 140-character updates. It is this flexibility, both in terms of use and development, that makes Twitter an attractive object or instrument of digital humanities scholarship.

 

 

 

Commentary.  Recently, Twitter's development staff released the Twitter Geotagging API, an Application Programming Interface that allows developers or researchers to mine geotag-enabled mobile tweets for location-based data, including everything from general city name to exact GPS coordinates.  The Twitter blog explains the goals behind this particular API: "The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends' tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations. Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community."  Beyond knowing where your friends are eating lunch, the Twitter API offers academics and other researchers the opportunity to mine mobile user "tweets" for location-based information that can be used for a variety of reasons, from tracking the frequency of tweets in a specific region (Los Angeles) to tracking the diffusion of conversation on a given topic, for instance "#Haiti."  

 

In relation to the @LitPlus Twitter Visualization Project, the ability to mine tweets within a specific geographic search radius using gps information and keywords grants us the opportunity to learn something about the way individuals interact with and perceive the spaces around them.  The Twitter API offers us the opportunity to seek out emergent patterns of observation and perception in terms of sensory experience in urban settings.  Starting with two specific locations, Los Angeles and New York City, as well as a set of sensory descriptors (i.e. seeing, hearing, smelling, etc.), we will utilize the Twitter API to filter for all tweets that contain our search terms AND fall within our desired search radius.  Though there are other methods for mining GPS data, none of them offer the kind of humanistic subjectivity inherent in a Twitter update.  The fact that Twitter is simultaneously a blog, social network, information network, and GPS database makes it a particularly rich tool possessing a potential array of digital humanities research applications.  

 

However, despite these obvious strengths, our project is limited to the total number of tweets that have been geotagged, or labeled with GPS information.  Though this number is quite large numerically, proportionally it represents only about a quarter of one percent of all Twitter updates.  Further, more potential problems stem from the fact that sensory descriptors (sound, vision, taste) can have multiple valences of meaning, a complication we will have to control or compensate for, before attempting to visualize our data.   

 

 

 

Resources for Further Study.  

 

The Mobile City. "Locative & Mobile Media/Culture/Identity." URL http://www.themobilecity.nl/ Site Opened: 2008

Twitter. http://www.twitter.com

Twitter API Wiki. http://apiwiki.twitter.com/

Twitter Official Blog. "Think Globally, Tweet Locally" Posted: 11/19/2009

Web Designer Depot.com "50 Great Examples of Data Visualization." http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/about/ Posted: 06/01/2009 

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