If you are just looking for keeping track of the number of tweets, and not concerned about keeping them around for later data processing, you can poll the search API every so often for your terms of interest and just update your counters on the fly.
pseudo code: let TOTAL = 0 let BUCKET = array of timeslices Do Forever Poll Search API for <term> let C = number of results TOTAL := TOTAL + C let BUCKET[i] be the current timeslice bucket (e.g. 11-12) BUCKET[i] := BUCKET[i] + C Store TOTAL and BUCKET[i] back to database Sleep for a bit End Do Not sure if this would be close to fitting your needs, but something to start with maybe... -Chad On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Jennie Lees <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > I'm looking for a way to find the number of tweets matching a certain > term, both overall and as a time series (e.g. how many results between > 11:00 and 12:00 - I want to monitor changes over time). > > I can't really see an obvious way to do this beyond making a local > copy of every tweet and searching those, then counting the results. I > believe that's what TwitScoop does, but I can't help but think this > isn't the most efficient way. > > Has anyone found another approach? > > Jen >
