I need a way to find out how many space bar presses there were during a certain timeframe in all uk tweets

[odmanfashions2]

Hello

I have been asked by a client for some stats data to be used for promotional purposes.

I would like to be able to be able to get the number of times the spacebar keyboard button was pressed in the whole of UK (all tweets originating from UK) during a certin timeframe (or ever if possible too).

As a developer my thinking is get all UK tweets (which I know is probably not provided by twitter API’s) and count the number of spaces, but I appreciate the response will be huge anyway and may not be accessible.

So I would like to know if you guys have a stats, pattern or trend api or tool where we can retrieve the number of occurences of provided character or string (including a space) without having to download all that data (if it were possible anyway).

Please someone get back to me asap as we need to know the direction we are going soon.

Thanks
alex

[episod]

This would be difficult to do accurately using anything less than the Firehose. If you narrow your wants to just tweets geotagged in a certain region, our Streaming API allows you setup location boxes, but it’s still going to be a difficult task. There’s no direct interfaces for the kind of data you’re looking for.

You might find counting things like this easier with a partner platform like Gnip, Datasift, or Topsy.