what in your opinion would be best way to get all the retweets from twitter

Question

working PHP probably on amazon ec2... can anyone explain what would be the best way to get all the retweets that contains http links from twitter using either twitter api or some kind of a third party parser (pubsubhub,xmpp, etc)? my application needs the widest aas possible perspective on that data meaning every retweet counts! in order to get the proper results i need to minimize as possible the amount of missed retweets that contain links suggestions anyone?

Answer 1

Do you mean retweets of a certain user? Or all retweets on Twitter that contain links?

You could use the Search API to look for tweets containing "RT" or "via" (two of the most common ways to retweet) and that also contain links. The URL might look like this:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?ors=via+RT&filter=links

Note that Twitter is nearing the launch of a new retweet method. Hopefully when they do there will be a native filter for retweets.