Sunday, November 7, 2010

New Twitterscour gem

I've finished working on a new Ruby gem, twitterscour. Simply type "gem install twitterscour" to install it. With this gem you can search for tweets by users or by specifying a search term. You may wonder what makes this different from the other twitter gems out there? Twitterscour actually pulls tweets from the Twitter web page, so every tweet that is publicly viewable is returned. Other gems use the Twitter API to get tweets, which will only return what Twitter considers the "most popular" tweets. For example, if I use the API to search for tweets by me when I'm not logged in, I only get 2 tweets back, despite the fact that I have over 60 tweets. Twitterscour will return all tweets by me.

1 comment:

Brent said...

Search term broke again a few days ago due to Twitter making some changes. I've fixed it with version 0.2. The search term results now include location, I'm using the twitter API to get the results. Unlike user search, the term search through the API appears to return all results and not just their "most popular" results.