The Twitter API

The Twitter API provides access to all the functions that we may want a Twitter client to perform. With the Twitter API, we can create clients that search for recent tweets, find out what's trending, look up user details, follow users' timelines, and even act on the behalf of users by posting tweets and direct messages for them.

We'll be looking at Twitter API version 1.1, the version current at time of writing this chapter.

Note

Twitter maintains comprehensive documentation for its API, which can be found at https://dev.twitter.com/overview/documentation.

A Twitter world clock

To illustrate some of the functionalities of the Twitter API, we're going to write the code for a simple Twitter world clock. Our application will periodically poll its Twitter account for mentions which contain a recognizable city name, and if it finds one, then it will reply to the Tweet with the current local time of that city. In Twitter speak, a mention is any Tweet which includes...