The anatomy of Twitter data
Twitter is a Social Network site which provides a micro-blogging service for sharing text messages up to 140 characters long (Tweets). We can retrieve several types of data from Twitter, such as Tweets, Followers, Likes, Direct Messages, and Trending Topics.
We can create a new Twitter account with the following link:
Tweet
A Tweet is the name of the 140-character text message. However, we can get more information than the text message itself, such as date and time, links, user mentions (@), hash tags (#), re-tweet count, local language, favorites count, and geocode. In the following screenshot, we can observe a tweet re-tweeted 745 times, with 336 likes, a hashtag (#WarEagle), and user mentions (@FootballAU and @CoachGuzMalzahn):
Followers
Users on Twitter can follow other users, creating a directed graph (see Chapter 10, Working with Social Graphs) with a lot of possibilities for analysis, such as centrality and community clustering. In this...
