Simple mucking about examples with node and Twitter using the twitter node package https://www.npmjs.org/package/twitter

npm install

you will need to register a Twitter application at https://apps.twitter.com/ and paste the access keys into config.js.

to see the full data available for tweets, run

node fullsamples

For 5 seconds, this will return a stream of randomly chosen Tweets, logged to the terminal.

to search for tweets with given content, run e.g.

node searchfor armadillo pangolin echidna

to find tweets mentioning these creatures, along with the author's name. tweets with any of the words will be returned. to search for tweets with all of a given set of words, surround the parameter list with quotes, e.g.

node searchfor "justin bieber"

this will run continuously. press ctrl-c to stop.

to search for tweets including a single word which have a given location, run

node findlocatedtweets Obama

this will run continuously. press ctrl-c to stop. unfortunately, the streaming API does not currently allow both a search phrase and location to be specified at the same time. you can, but the logic is such that tweets matching EITHER the phrase OR having location are found. this script finds all tweets with location, then filters for those matching the search term. this is horribly inefficient in terms of bandwidth. an alternative approach would be to do the reverse: bring back tweets matching, then filter on those with specified location in the data. which is more bandwidth efficient would depend on the number of tweets matching the search term. only a relatively small number have specified location. a trending term would probably return more than all tweets with location.

node mapserver <search word>

this starts up a Node Express server, which streams tweets matching a word and serves it over a websocket to a page where a Google Map renders all new tweets with location. view the page on http://localhost:3000/ you will need to register an API key for Google Maps, at https://console.developers.google.com, and paste this into the script URL.

TODO:

• show tweet text on click / mouseover of map markers. - DONE
• allow user to enter the search term on the page. - DONE
• improve visual representation of many markers in same area.
• reverse logic as discussed in previous example, which would allow multiple words, colour code the map markers according to which word found.
• put this up on the web, with fixed term and map.