Intro to Python for Computer Science and Data Science: Learning to Program with AI, Big Data and The Cloud

13.13 Twitter Streaming API

Twitter’s free Streaming API sends to your app randomly selected tweets dynamically as they occur—up to a maximum of one percent of the tweets per day. According to InternetLiveStats.com, there are approximately 6000 tweets per second, which is over 500 million tweets per day.²³ So the Streaming API gives you access to approximately five million tweets per day. Twitter used to allow free access to 10% of streaming tweets, but this service—called the fire hose—is now available only as a paid service. In this section, we’ll use a class definition and an IPython session to walk through the steps for processing streaming tweets. Note that the code for receiving a tweet stream requires creating a custom class that inherits ...