Give me my tweets from July 6, 2007

March 28, 2009 6:40 PM

Extracting twitter updates for a particular date through the API... how?!

I've scoured the API documentation, and I can't seem to figure this out (my hope is that I'm overlooking some simple, elegant solution). Is there a way, preferably using the REST API with PHP, to grab tweets based on a given date? I've read this question, I know about TweetDumpr, and using "since" doesn't achieve what I want since it pulls in all the unneeded tweets AFTER the specified date as well.

This isn't just a personal project; if I can get this to work, it would be on a multi-user scale, where each user supplies his or her twitter credentials and can then see their tweets when they click on a specific day. Manually downloading a CSV file and parsing it each and every time would be a waste of server resources. It seems like the API would be robust enough to handle a "SELECT ALL TWEETS FROM $date". Am I living in some simplistic tweet fantasy world or what?!

Please hope me!

posted by (bb|[^b]{2}) to computers & internet (6 comments total)

You can use the search "API", at least for public tweets:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:trs+since:2009-03-02+until:2009-03-02
posted by thebabelfish at 7:18 PM on March 28

That won't get me the updates for a specific person, however. The way I'm using it, the user will already be authenticated via OAuth, so whether they're updates are public or private shouldn't matter. I'm just trying to get the updates for one person on one particular date.
posted by bjork24 at 7:39 PM on March 28

No, it will get you updates for a specific person. Note the "from:trs" (that's me) in the query.
posted by thebabelfish at 7:41 PM on March 28

Nice double accounts, by the way. ; )
posted by thebabelfish at 7:43 PM on March 28

I am using a friend's account. :O
posted by bjork24 at 7:45 PM on March 28

Hmm. I tried your method (using my own username) and it pulled up random tweets, but not my own.
posted by bjork24 at 7:47 PM on March 28