How do I grab all tweets from a hashtag?

August 19, 2012 11:53 AM

How do I download all tweets associated with a particular hashtag?

I attended a conference last week and would really like to analyze how the back channel twitter conversation at the meeting enhanced the overall experience. I know that Twitter only provides the last 1500 tweets for any search and by the time I tried to download tweets, it was the Saturday of the conference (which ran Mon-Fri) and I could only get tweets from mid-week on.

I know from looking through various sources that there are between 1900-2000 tweets (max) under this hashtag.

Is there a tweet archiving service that will allow me to get to this? I've tried Topsy's API but only managed to get around 1600 or so.

If it matters, the conference ran from August 5th through the 10th. I'd be willing to pay for the data too if there is a service that charges for it.

posted by special-k to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

AFAIK there's no way to do this without setting it up in advance, and even then there's no guarantee that a particular requestor will have seen every tweet under a particular tag.
posted by rhizome at 1:32 PM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: In case anyone came here looking for an answer, I paid Topsy (they charged me a custom rate) and gave me all ~3200 Tweets under the hashtag (as of a certain date). Not cheap but was worth it.
posted by special-k at 7:54 PM on December 27, 2012