I would like to download tweets based on certain search terms. I'm aware of HTTP GET and such techniques, but I'm not sure the best way to create a simple executable that downloads the tweets and saves them for subsequent analysis.
Any ideas? I'm a basic programmer - if you say "use curl" I know roughly what you mean but not how to set up an application to run curl commands!
Hence my dilemna.
Thanks in advance!
You absolutely can do it in c# or any other language.
From a very rudimentary standpoint, the Twitter API wiki will tell you how, but I know that's not what you're really asking.
I would suggest getting familiar with a good API such as Tweetsharp which also has methods not only for getting your typical timelines, but also using search. The advantage to this (aside from not having to handle your own serialization, etc.) is that it unifies the timeline and search calls as they are actually slightly different API's.
The downside to this approach though is that you're not going to be able to directly translate it to a mac, unless you write it using Silverlight.
the upside to this approach is that Tweetsharp gives you a number of options on how it gives you the data, which in turn gives you a number of options as to how to save the data.