How can I use the Twitter Search API to return all tweets that match my search query, posted only within the last five seconds?

Question

I would like to use the API to return all tweets that match my search query, but only tweets posted within the last five seconds.

With Twitter's Search API, I can use the since_id to grab all tweets from a specific ID. However, I can't really see a good way to find the tweet ID to begin from.

I'm also aware that you can use "since:" in the actual query to use a date, but you cannot enter a time.

Can someone with Twitter API experience offer me any advice? Thanks for reading and your time!

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Search-API-Documentation

Solution 1

This sounds like something you can do on your end, as created_at is one of the fields returned in the result set. Just do your query, and only use the ones that are within the last 5 seconds.

Solution 2

        <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
    // JavaScript Document
    $(document).ready(function(){

    // start twitter API    
    $.getJSON('http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/YOUR_NAME.json?count=10&callback=?', function(data){
        $.each(data, function(index, item){
            $('#twitter').append('<div class="tweet"><p>' + item.text.linkify() + '</p><p><strong>' + relative_time(item.created_at) + '</strong></p></div>');
        });

    });


    function relative_time(time_value) {
      var values = time_value.split(" ");
      time_value = values[1] + " " + values[2] + ", " + values[5] + " " + values[3];
      var parsed_date = Date.parse(time_value);
      var relative_to = (arguments.length > 1) ? arguments[1] : new Date();
      var delta = parseInt((relative_to.getTime() - parsed_date) / 1000);
      delta = delta + (relative_to.getTimezoneOffset() * 60);

      var r = '';
      if (delta < 60) {
        r = 'a minute ago';
      } else if(delta < 120) {
        r = 'couple of minutes ago';
      } else if(delta < (45*60)) {
        r = (parseInt(delta / 60)).toString() + ' minutes ago';
      } else if(delta < (90*60)) {
        r = 'an hour ago';
      } else if(delta < (24*60*60)) {
        r = '' + (parseInt(delta / 3600)).toString() + ' hours ago';
      } else if(delta < (48*60*60)) {
        r = '1 day ago';
      } else {
        r = (parseInt(delta / 86400)).toString() + ' days ago';
      }

      return r;
    }

    String.prototype.linkify = function() {
        return this.replace(/[A-Za-z]+:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9-_]+\.[A-Za-z0-9-_:%&\?\/.=]+/, function(m) {
            return m.link(m);
        });
    };// end twitter API




}); // ***** end functions *****
    </script>

           <div id="twitter">
    Target Div                      

    </div>

Comments

[rmh]

Not for the Search API. There's no rate limits. I would want to poll the top tweet every five seconds.

[rmh]

Because it orders them by popularity, not by time. So for most polls, it won't be a different tweet.

[Kon]

Sorry, I must be missing something. This looks like it's in chronological order: search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=microsoft

[rmh]

That's so bizarre, it is! When I was constructing my queries it wasn't, for some reason. I can't remember what I was doing. Okay, thanks... feel silly now. :)

[Jivko Petiov]

There's rate limits for the Search API but noone knows what they are. I think 5 seconds is fine as long as you're not doing multiple concurrent API requests as well.