Tweets from past periods

Question

I need to use Python to download tweets (probably in the order of the tens of thousands) from past periods. Should I use the streaming API? Do you have any reference to suggest? Thanks

Also can be achieved with Gnip, which is also a paid service. http://gnip.com/products/historical/ — Jeff Lesser, Oct 28 '13 at 21:29

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 27 '13 at 15:22

1

Streaming API do not deal with past periods, you should use search/tweets. Be aware of fact that it returns up to 3200 tweets. Also, from the docs

Search API is not meant to be an exhaustive source of Tweets. Not all Tweets will be indexed or made available via the search interface.

For the reference, list libraries to deal with API can be found there.

answered Oct 27 '13 at 15:22

alko

46,136
12
94
102

thanks for the clarification! Do you know what's the way to overcome the 3200 tweets limitation? – albus_c Oct 27 '13 at 15:35
not with twitter api. something can be done with topsy http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57601209-93/topsy-indexes-entire-tweet-history-for-search-analysis/, but they are paid service http://api.topsy.com/doc/pricing/ – alko Oct 27 '13 at 16:59

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 09 '13 at 19:38

Like they said, you cannot retrieve past tweets from their streaming API. You can try to look for free datasets like these ones (but it is quite difficult that the dataset that you find fits your needs):

http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/twitter-census-developer-tools-mapping-from-twitter-user-search-

http://www.sananalytics.com/lab/twitter-sentiment/

Tweets from past periods

2 Answers2

Linked