Where should I send the request for loosening the limits of data mining?

[CaiHaitao]

Hi all, our research group need to have access to older tweets and higher rate of data mining in Twitter. Can anyone tell me to which department of Twitter should the request be sent?

Thanks in advance!

[andypiper]

Hi there. You have a few options here.

For access to Tweets older than a week or so (provided by the public Search API) you can use our commercial Gnip service. Unfortunately the search API itself has never provided data beyond that limited date range so there’s no way for us to grant any kind of additional elevated access on that.

For ongoing access to the Streaming API you can file a request at https://support.twitter.com/forms/platform for Elevated Access - these are typically granted on a time-limited basis for specific applications. Obviously this would only enable you to listen to the stream going forward rather than searching backwards.

The final option is our Data Grants programme, but this is currently closed to new requests.

[CaiHaitao]

Hi Andy, Thanks a lot for your valuable information!

Could you tell me whether it is possible to harvest the old tweets (older than the most recent 3,200) from users’ timelines? Also, when can we expect the Data Grants programme to re-open?

[andypiper]

The API only goes back to a limit of 3200 tweets, I’m afraid.

I have no information on the Data Grants programme at this time - there were a very small number of projects accepted on the initial run. I probably would not recommend this as a long term solution to your request, I was just noting that it does exist as part of my initial response.

[CaiHaitao]

Thank you for your prompt reply! We will try to make use of the first two options you suggested.