As per the writing of this chapter, there are 317 million monthly active users of the Twitter social service. More and more people are relying on social media services to obtain the latest news and opinions of other users. Twitter is a very friendly platform for developers; and with their APIs, you can access its core data via two main categories: REST and Streaming. What you can do with all that data is almost limitless. You can track and build an opinion analysis of a person, technology product, or a global issue. Politicians and celebrities are the heart of the Twitter platform, and news usually breaks on Twitter first and later on the other social media outlets.
Before you start hacking with the Streaming API, you need to provide Twitter with a few things:
- You need a Twitter account.
- You have to create an app and get access tokens.
- To connect to the service, you need four credentials: Consumer key, Consumer Secret, Access Token, and Access Token Secret.
After you create...