Professional Twitter® Development With Examples in .NET 3.5

Chapter 2. The Twitter REST API

"Twitter is a succinct concept so its API is small and compact. That makes it very approachable by a broad range of developers. A weekend hobbyist can easily tinker around with it and have something up and running in a few hours while a professional can use the API's simplicity as a building block to create interesting variations and extensions of the service."

—Lee Brenner, blu

In Chapter 1, you learned how a RESTful service is organized, and how to write web queries using the System.Net namespace. You will build on this knowledge by utilizing the NUrl tool to communicate with the Twitter API.

Obtaining a Twitter Account

If you haven't already done so, now is a good time to sign up for a Twitter account. An account allows you to access the authenticated portions of the API, which make up a considerable amount of the features available for use. Signing up for an account is straightforward; just open your browser to http://twitter.com/signup and follow the on-screen prompts. Figure 2-1 shows a typical signup page.

Figure 2.1. Figure 2-1

This chapter breaks down how Twitter itself is structured, the anatomy of the REST API, how Twitter objects are represented in returned data, and how to send and receive data using the Twitter API. Each API call includes a typical usage scenario, as well as any special considerations you need to make when building your application ...