GET statuses/sample only returning recent tweets?

[md9_michael]

I’m trying to use GET statuses/sample from the streaming API to build a large sample of public tweets and have two questions.

1. When I try to access GET statuses/sample, I’m only getting recent tweets (i.e. tweets made in the past couple of days, if not in the past hour). is this normal? My understanding was that I should be getting tweets from the past as well…

2. Does the output of GET statuses/sample include the date/time the tweet was posted?

[andypiper]

My understanding was that I should be getting tweets from the past as well…

No. statuses/sample is realtime. You cannot get historical Tweets from the streaming endpoints, you will only get new Tweets from the time that you connect.

The Tweet objects will contain the timestamp of the Tweet.