The anatomy of Twitter data

Twitter is a social networking website, which provides a micro-blogging service for sharing text messages up to 140 characters (or tweets). We can retrieve a variety of data from Twitter such as tweets, followers, favorites, direct messages, and trending topics.

We can create a new Twitter account using the following link:

http://twitter.com

Tweet

Tweet is the name of the 140-character long text message. However, we can get more information than the text message itself such as date and time, links, user mentions (@), hash tags (#), retweets count, locale language, favorites count, and geocode. In the following screenshot, we can observe a tweet retweeted 1001 times, marked as favorite 336 times with a hashtag (#NBAFinals) and user mentions (@Spurs and @MiamiHEAT):

Followers

The 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...