Using the Twitter API

Question

I am trying to build a small useful application with twitter. I will publish it as an open source project once I am done. I am trying to decide what is the best way to do the following:

I want to get the latest 200 tweets from Washington for example and see the most important thing these 200 tweets share. For example, if 20 tweets have tweeted the same link, this is probably an important story in Washington. Or if 50 tweets mentioned (This specific subject) it means this is important and I could get information about it.

What is the best way to do that? and is there a better way to get this information without getting the latest 200 tweets (except trends).

If you feel like this is not clear enough please provide some questions and I will clear this up

Thank you all for the help.

Answer 1

I don't think there is going to be any "custom" trending available, so you are going to have to parse out the links from the search results yourself.

You would use the search api function:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?geocode=40.757929%2C-73.985506%2C25km

After that, it should be pretty trivial to maintain a list of trends and links over the past 24 hours.

Answer 2

I would suggest you use a php twitter library which does already the things you wrote. Please have a look at this question to find a library which fits your needs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/422879/best-twitter-php-library