How can I use the Twitter Search API to return all tweets that match my search query, posted only within the last five seconds?

Question

I would like to use the API to return all tweets that match my search query, but only tweets posted within the last five seconds.

With Twitter's Search API, I can use the since_id to grab all tweets from a specific ID. However, I can't really see a good way to find the tweet ID to begin from.

I'm also aware that you can use "since:" in the actual query to use a date, but you cannot enter a time.

Can someone with Twitter API experience offer me any advice? Thanks for reading and your time!

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Search-API-Documentation

Answer 1

Are you trying to poll tweets in real time? Doesn't twitter have a limit on API req/hour. I think you'd hit that pretty fast.

Answer 2

Why don't you just make a call to the API every 5 seconds and grab the top 1 tweet.

Answer 3

This sounds like something you can do on your end, as created_at is one of the fields returned in the result set. Just do your query, and only use the ones that are within the last 5 seconds.

Answer 4

     <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
 // JavaScript Document
 $(document).ready(function(){

 // start twitter API 
 $.getJSON('http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/YOUR_NAME.json?count=10&amp;callback=?', function(data){
  $.each(data, function(index, item){
   $('#twitter').append('<div class="tweet"><p>' + item.text.linkify() + '</p><p><strong>' + relative_time(item.created_at) + '</strong></p></div>');
  });

 });


 function relative_time(time_value) {
   var values = time_value.split(" ");
   time_value = values[1] + " " + values[2] + ", " + values[5] + " " + values[3];
   var parsed_date = Date.parse(time_value);
   var relative_to = (arguments.length > 1) ? arguments[1] : new Date();
   var delta = parseInt((relative_to.getTime() - parsed_date) / 1000);
   delta = delta + (relative_to.getTimezoneOffset() * 60);

   var r = '';
   if (delta < 60) {
  r = 'a minute ago';
   } else if(delta < 120) {
  r = 'couple of minutes ago';
   } else if(delta < (45*60)) {
  r = (parseInt(delta / 60)).toString() + ' minutes ago';
   } else if(delta < (90*60)) {
  r = 'an hour ago';
   } else if(delta < (24*60*60)) {
  r = '' + (parseInt(delta / 3600)).toString() + ' hours ago';
   } else if(delta < (48*60*60)) {
  r = '1 day ago';
   } else {
  r = (parseInt(delta / 86400)).toString() + ' days ago';
   }

   return r;
 }

 String.prototype.linkify = function() {
  return this.replace(/[A-Za-z]+:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9-_]+\.[A-Za-z0-9-_:%&\?\/.=]+/, function(m) {
   return m.link(m);
  });
 };// end twitter API




}); // ***** end functions *****
 </script>

           <div id="twitter">
 Target Div         

 </div>

Answer 5

Twitter API results are sorted by recent by default. Please see the following quote from twitter wiki :

Parameter to Twitter search API :

result_type: Optional. Specifies what type of search results you would prefer to receive.

* Valid values include:


      o mixed: In a future release this will become the default value. Include both popular and real time results in the response.
      o recent: The current default value. Return only the most recent results in the response.
      o popular: Return only the most popular results in the response.
* Example: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=Twitter&result_type=mixed
* Example: http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=twitterapi&result_type=popular
* Example: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=justin+bieber&result_type=recent

Please correct me if I am wrong anywhere.

Thanks and Regards,
Abhay Dandekar