what did you say?
I've been poking around at the Twitter API, in part just out of curiosity about what features are exposed. I have an interest in writing some visualisation widgets based upon it. The iPhone development course is also using a Twitter client as something of a 'hello world' app, too. Today, Tim O'Reilly pointed to a wordle visualisation of all the things that he's tweeted and gave a link to some code that could be used to download everything you'd tweeted. I had a look at it and decided to write something similar, using the Twitter API directly, rather than scraping the Twitter site.
The Twitter API I've been using is the excellent, minimalist python twitter tools by Mike Verdone. The main advantage over other python Twitter APIs is that ptt doesn't redefine any of the API calls. It does exactly what it says in the published Twitter API. As a result, it is incredibly easy to use. The 100 or so lines it is implemented in are also a very instructive read, to see how it is put together. I think it is a great example of how the attributes in Python can be used.
The code I wrote is available for download. It respects the rate limiting imposed by Twitter and will output all of the tweets for a particular user, to a file called <username>.tweet in the file it is run from. You can change which users are fetched in the main() ftn. The resulting text file can be opened up and then copy/ pasted over into the wordle creator.
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