Sams Teach Yourself the Twitter API in 24 Hours

Hour 19. Streaming API

What You’ll Learn in This Hour:

• The three types of streaming APIs

• The user streams and site streams

• The Firehose, Gardenhose, Birddog, and Shadow

The Three Types of Streaming APIs

Because search was never designed to support large-scale queries or the volume of tweets Twitter has seen recently, the streaming architecture was put in place.

There are three Twitter API sets: the RESTful APIs, Search, and the streaming APIs. Streaming is as it sounds, opening up a connection to the Twitter servers and getting a stream of information back.

There are three main streaming products: the Streaming API, user streams, and sites streams. How we would call and work with each type of stream is basically the same, but each one ...