| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Authentication | Twitter API clients must authenticate with OAuth 1.0 and OAuth 2.0 |
| Accessing Twitter API | Requires Twitter Develop Account |
| Data Sources | Tweets, Likes, Trends, Users, Direct Messages, Places, Media |
| Data Return Format | JSON |
| API Wrappers and Libraries | Available multiple languages like Python, R, C#, Node.Js, Java, Ruby, Kotlin, GO, PHP |
| API Communication Methods | GET, PUT, POST, DELETE |
| Is It Free | Yes. Advanced features like high traffic rates and more data requests can be accessed through paid premium accounts. |
| Privacy Policy | You must follow the Twitter API Automation Rules. Also, you must disclose the data retrieval, usage, and storage in your Application’s privacy policy. |
Ever wondered if there’s a way to programmatically retrieve the public Twitter data, analyze it, and use it to build a real-time application? Well, over the past few years, we can very easily stream and retrieve the public data through the Twitter API to a specific website, and use it for research and further real-time app development purposes.
In this article, we have covered a detailed guide on how to connect and retrieve the Twitter data through a data transmission programming interface/protocol called an API, so you can consolidate the twitter data in one place, use it for academic research concerns, and also share it with other developers. We have also included information on how you can develop a real-time app through the latest Twitter API v2. Sounds exciting, right?
Yes, the authentication process is crucial but really easy to do. You just need to sign up for a Twitter developer account and answer a few basic questions to get the essential access.
The most general authentication is made through OAuth 1.0a User Context and OAuth 2.0 Bearer Token to make your first request. After that, you can directly start a project App.
Follow the instructions:
Step 1: Sign up for a developer account, and answer a few mandatory questions to get the official essential access.
Step 2: Secure and save your API tokens and keys from your developer portal. Think of API token and keys as your ID and Password. You can also regenerate these keys and tokens on your own within your App through the App developer portal.
Step 3: Make your first request with a tool of your choice after authentication and securing your token and keys.
You can access data resources encoded in JavaScript Object Notation, in short – the JSON along with many other languages like Ruby, Python, and many other formats. Here are the data resources types you can access through Twitter API:
No matter what language format you prefer to write in. With Twitter API, you can access the data in multiple languages, so there’s no restriction regarding language formats.
Via Libraries/Wrappers
| Language | Library/Wrapper |
|---|---|
| Python | Tweepy |
| Java | Twittered |
| Ruby | Tweetkit |
| Javascript / Node.js | node-twitter-API-v2 |
| Kotlin | KTweet |
| GO | gotwtr |
| C# / (.NET) | CoreTwee |
| PHP | Bird-Elephant |
Here’s the process:
Step 1: Sign in to your developer account.
Step 2: Go to the ‘get-started’ page and click on “Create an App”. Alternatively, you can go to the “Accelerate” dropdown menu in the top right corner of the developer portal and then Click on the “Apps”. Then on the loaded page, click on “Create an App”.
Step 3: Add your App details, like App Name, Description, Website URL, etc. Then at the bottom of the page, click “Create”.
Step 4: Go to the “Keys and Tokens” tab to access the consumer API and Access Token keys by clicking the “Create” button. You can also regenerate these API keys and tokens. Consumer API keys are mandatory security keys to set up your connection in Python or R. These packages in different programming languages will also require the Access Token Keys as an input to authenticate yourself to start receiving the data.
Step 5: In your tool’s command line, load the Twitter library. Here’s a sample snippet in R for your reference:
library(twitteR)
Step 6: Create four variables to add the four Token and Access keys to set up your Twitter API Credentials.
Step 7: Authenticate yourself via OAuth1.0 or OAuth 2.0 via linking your API keys and Access credentials.
Step 8: Write the required function to create the App of your choice. Here’s a reference that we have created to request access to Tweets data about ‘Books’ for up to 200 tweets in the English language at a time:
searchTwitter('#books', n=200, lang= "en")
Step 9: You have successfully obtained the Twitter data for the tweets you want to link on your App.
Twitter API basically uses four HTTP methods to access the data:
| Name | Purpose |
|---|---|
| GET | To Recoup the data |
| PUT | To Update the data |
| POST | To Create the Data |
| DELETE | To Remove the Data |
Here‘s an example GET request to access the data through Twitter API. Here “your_need” can be replaced with “Tweets”, “Trends” or the type of data you want to access. While, “your_topic” can be replaced with the topic of the data you want to receive can be “Covid19”, “Pandemic19”, or any other topic of your concerns:
curl -X GET -H "Authorization: Bearer $APP_ACCESS_TOKEN" "https://api.twitter.com/labs/1/your_need/stream/your_topic?partition=1"
Yes. You can instantly access the Twitter API for free through Essential access.
However, you can purchase the Premium package based on the level and amount of data you want to access and the number of requests you want to generate per month.
Meanwhile, you can contact Twitter for the Enterprise plan.
Twitter prohibits the use of Twitter Data and Twitter API data for any surveillance purposes. You must not violate Twitter policies in any case to use them, otherwise, it may lead to concerning circumstances. You are also warned to carefully use Twitter data for sensitive topics like health, religion, ethnicity, politics, etc.
Always be mindful of the privacy policies before actually streaming and using the real-time data. Make sure to provide information in your App’s privacy policy to list how you collected, recorded, and managed the data.
Here’s how you can benefit yourself with the data through the Twitter API:
Generally, there are traffic rate limits for Essential access. Clients accessing the Twitter API via OAuth 1.0 and OAuth 2.0 using Essential access are limited to making only 30 requests per min.
While this requests limitation can be avoided with a Premium product package that allows you to make up to 60 requests per minute. Isn’t it great, right?
