How do you pull in all tweets that mention a specific url in twitter?

Question

I basically would like to figure out if I could search for all tweets that talks about a url, for example, http://twitter.com/blah. Ideally the search should also count the shortened url. Any pointers?

Answer 1

You may want to look into the Twitter API Documentation documentation which includes a search method.

Your request to also search for shortened URLs is curious, though - I understand why you might want to do that but I can't imagine how you believe it might work. Since Twitter itself doesn't hold the expanded version of a short URL, there wouldn't be any way to use the Twitter search function to look for shortened links. And since you can't predict which URL shortener people might use, you won't know what to look for anyway.

Answer 2

Topsy's Otter API provides this functionality: http://code.google.com/p/otterapi/wiki/Resources#/linkposts