I'm working with a research group at the Ohio State University that is interested in using tweets to study communication. Our project is made up of sociologists and geographers, and we are particularly interested in looking at social networks and the space-time context of discussions. We want to be sure not to violate the terms of service, specifically:
4. You will not attempt or encourage others to: E. use or access the Twitter API to aggregate, cache (except as part of a Tweet), or store place and other geographic location information contained in Twitter Content. We want to use locations, and would like to know what steps can we take to avoid violating the TOS. Would any of these measures below or some combination of them satisfy the requirements? - Not storing tweet ID - Not storing user ID - Not storing full 140-character status, only whether our topics of interest were mentioned - Generalize precise geolocations to a coarser level (Census tract/ neighborhood/county) Hopefully I haven't overlooked an answer to this question elsewhere. I found another post here asking for clarification (http://goo.gl/ hArk9), so it looks like clarification could benefit others, as well. If we need to ask for an exception to the TOS, where should we direct our application? Thanks, Johnathan Rush @rushgeo PhD student in Geography -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: https://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: https://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: https://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/twitter-development-talk
