Understanding Twitter's APIs

Twitter APIs provide a means to access the Twitter data; that is, tweets sent by its millions of users. Let's get to know these APIs a bit better.

Twitter vocabulary

As described earlier, Twitter is a microblogging service with a social aspect. It allows its users to express their views/sentiments through an Internet SMS, called "tweets" in the context of Twitter. These tweets are entities formed of maximum of 140 characters. The content of these tweets can be anything ranging from a person's mood to person's location to a person's curiosity. The platform on which these tweets are posted is called a Timeline. To use Twitter's APIs, one must understand the basic terminology.

Tweets are the crux of Twitter. Theoretically, a tweet is just 140 characters of text content tweeted by a user, but there is more to it than just that. There is more metadata associated with the same tweet, which are classified by Twitter as entities...