Using social media to study social pheonomena: An example using Twitter data

Twitter is a social networking platform that offers a simple, yet powerful service. The majority of its functionality resides in 140-character-maximum statuses, or `tweets´. We are developing a Java application that utilizes the service´s application programming interfaces (APIs). The purpose is to offer a level of integrated functionality not provided by their website, and to circumvent some of the time constraints of manual analysis. The application provides a convenient way to pull tweets for a particular user or a specified search query into a delimited text document, offering very simple integration with spreadsheet software for analysis. This would be an especially valuable tool for people researching social networking activity, but can also be utilized by anyone to analyze public response to current events or popular culture. An example based on current events is presented.