12.4. Example: finding co-occurring words in a Twitter feed

You’ll be using a Python library called python-twitter. The source code can be found at http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/. As you may have guessed, it allows you to access the microblogging site, Twitter, with Python. If you aren’t familiar with Twitter.com, it’s a channel for communicating with others. Posts are limited to 140 characters in length. Each post is called a tweet.

The documentation for the Twitter API can be found at http://dev.twitter.com/doc. The keywords aren’t exactly the same between the API documentation and the Python module. I recommend looking at the Python file twitter.py to fully understand how to use the library. See appendix A for installation instructions for the module. You’ll use only one small portion of the library, but you can do much more with the API, so I encourage you to explore all functionality of the API.