Working with the Twitter APIs

Twitter provides APIs that cover the whole gamut of operations that we might like to invoke for interacting with the service. Through the APIs, we can update our status, send direct messages to other users, list our friends and followers, and search for tweets by keyword, among many other useful features.

Twitter APIs are all pure HTTP-based requests. Any method that just retrieves data such as a search operation is implemented by using an HTTP GET request, whereas any method that updates, deletes, or creates, an object is implemented by using an HTTP POST request. Most of the APIs conform to REST design principals and support XML and JSON data formats, RSS, and Atom Syndication Formats.

Note

We can interact with the Twitter APIs by using any tool or programming language that allows us to interact with a web server using HTTP requests.

In order to use the APIs, you first need to create an application with your own Twitter user account. To do this, you will need...