Jolie,

I definitely learned something about Twitter today. I had known for a while that only a limited timeline of tweets was indexed for search (most recent week or so), but I was not aware that some tweets or hastags may be excluded wholesale. I read this article for further confirmation of your issue, as well as the Twitter support document on it. It seems if you include a URL Twitter is even less likely to include your tweets in search; while this is anecdotally reported by users, it makes sense, as Twitter spiders every link and relies on their link shortening service completely.

I followed your research on the issue and looked at the streaming API as well. Unfortunately the streaming library is intended only for new (incoming) tweets; i.e., you can't load tweets from prior to the time your began the request to Twitter, from what I can tell. As for Apache, as a side note, Apache is both a foundation and a product. Apache as a software product is a webserver. The documentation refers to the Apache HttpClient, written in Java and somewhat tricky to implement. I looked for a simple web-based streaming client; there are a few but they only served to confirm the "incoming only" notion.

I wish I had found otherwise searching on this issue; I thought Twitter would be a bit more robust here. Only think I can think is that some service that indexes tweets externally, like Faavorite, would help, but their search wouldn't work correctly when I tried your hashtag, which is a bad sign...

You may have to fall back on creating a class Twitter account, or something along those lines.

Best of luck,

Ben

On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Jolie Kennedy <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi Folks,
I'm new to the list. I have a question that is not specifically about CSS as the list description indicates, but a friend thought that someone might be able to help me with this question...

I'm using twitter for a class assignment in which students use the hashtag #CI312 (this is for class CI2312/4312 Sex, Drugs, & the Internet) when they find information on the Internet related to class topics.

Unfortunately the hashtag is not indexed so when I search on twitter for #CI312, I get no results.

I have created a list for the class: https://twitter.com/JolieKennedy/sex-drugs-the-internet

However, I would like to be able to search for the hashtag #CI312

I did a little research. I think I need an http client like apache. Here is the stream that I would like to access from the twitter "firehose."

https://stream.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/filter.json?track=CI312

Here are some of the links with some information.

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/faq#8650
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/parameters#track
https://dev.twitter.com/docs
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/twitter-libraries

I have never used an http client or twitter library. Anyone know about this?
Thanks!
Jolie

--

Jolie Kennedy
Learning Technologies
University of Minnesota
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619.987.5654
@joliekennedy
http://www.joliekennedy.com