I don't know much about programming so will be hiring someone to do it for me, but I was wondering what things would you think would be needed to get certain tweets from Twitter-probably using the Search API & then analyse them & link them to other tweets, before then outputting them into a spreadsheet or similar. What I mean is-would it need to be mySQP, RoR, C# etc-as you can see I know very little about that sort of stuff!
Thank you for any answers-very much appreciated!
I believe most there is a twitter API for most major programming languages.
Personally I'd pick a very high level language like python. Here is a link to the python-twitter interface outputting from there into other formats (XML, Spreadsheet, CSV) is quite trivial.
I guess it also depends what processing you want to do on the data.
This is a very general question so I'm afraid I can give only a very general answer.
What you describe can be done in most programming languages. C# or Ruby (you don't really need the rails part, that's for building websites) would certainly be good candidates. Java, Python etc. can also do this. There are libraries for accessing the twitter api's for all these languages. Matching and outputting tweets to a spreadsheet is also fairly language independent as most spreadsheets will read comma separated value files.
MySQL is a database and would not be a good candidate, you can do limited programming with most databases but this is probably not what you want.
I'd look for a good programmer first and then let him/her work in the language of choice. Usually finding good programmers is the hard part.
As already stated, this can be done easily in pretty much any language.
Personally, I'd do this in Perl. In my experience, for all the bad press Perl has gotten over the years, it remains the best thing out there for text processing, which is what it looks like you want to do.
Perl also has the Net::Twitter module, which allows you to access data from Twitter quite trivially. As an example, I present some code for Monitoring Hashtags with Perl and Net::Twitter which I posted to my coding blog a couple days ago. (Hopefully, it will also do some good towards countering the persistent myths of Perl as a write-only language...)