Find Number of Tweets From Geolocation every 15 minutes

[nickwelp]

I’m looking to build an App that counts the Number of Tweets to come from Austin, TX per unit of time. While I can stream the total number of tweets from each geo-area, that seems like a heavy Burden on Twitter when I really only wish to count the total.

Is this possible via the API?

[andypiper]

No, there’s no easy way to do this. The Streaming API would probably be your best option, and you’d have to total the Tweets over the period yourself. Making REST search calls would be rate-limited and probably less complete than listening to a stream.

[nickwelp]

I followed your advice and set this system up in Streaming API. So far it works great actually, and wasn’t very hard after learning the Streaming API. On average I pull in about 550~650 tweets every 15 minutes during the day, 50~60 c4am, with TV prime time going as high as 1250 tweets in 15 minutes, and climaxes of televised football games pulling as much as 3000 tweets in 15 minutes. Do you foresee any problems with what I’m doing causing any issues with Twitter? I definitely don’t want to get any sort of ban/block/blacklist issue.

[andypiper]

No, but you should be aware that for accuracy and completeness this would be a commercial (Gnip) API question. You’re welcome to continue to use the public streaming API, but it may not be complete or comprehensive, and will generally represent a 1% sample of the firehose.