Most of you have heard of Twitter, but if you have not, check out how Wikipedia describes Twitter:
"an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets"."
In 2013, users posted 400 million messages per day on Twitter. Twitter offers an API that gives developers real-time access to streams of tweets. On it, messages are public by default. The volume of messages, the availability of an API, and the public nature of tweets combine to make Twitter a valuable source of insights on current events, topics of interest, public sentiment, and so on.
Storm was originally developed at BackType to process tweets, and Twitter analysis is still a popular use case of Storm. You can see several examples on the Storm website at https://storm.apache.org/documentation/Powered-By.html.
The topology in this chapter demonstrates how to read from Twitter's real-time streaming API, computing a ranking of the most popular words. It's a Python...