Who's doing the talking?
We'll use the TwitterAPI
module to gather information about people by using the Twitter social network. This is not necessarily the "best" social network. It's widely-used and has a good API. Other social networking software is also important, and worthy of study. We have to begin somewhere, and Twitter seems to have a fairly low barrier to entry.
In Chapter 1, New Missions, New Tools, we downloaded the Twitter API. For information on how to use this package, visit http://pythonhosted.org/TwitterAPI/.
The first step to using Twitter is to have a Twitter account. This is easy and free. Agents who don't have a Twitter account can sign up at http://www.twitter.com. Once signed up, agents might want to follow the Twitter feed of PacktPub (https://twitter.com/PacktPub) to see how Twitter works.
An agent will need to provide a mobile phone number to Twitter to create applications. The information is available here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/110250-adding-your-mobile...