Question

I’m building a node.js application that opens up a connection to the Twitter Streaming API (v1.1)

I would like to filter multiple keywords (hashtags & words) as separate queries. My original idea was to have multiple public streams.

However, I understand that I can only have one open connection to the Twitter streaming api per application and per IP address and that Twitter encourages us to come up with creative solutions to get what we want.

So my question is this:

If I stream with no filters, such as using statuses/sample (which I believe is 1%) and use custom javascript to filter the output, would I get the same tweets if I used the API method of filtering (i.e track=’twitter’).

Edit: I have created a diagram explaining this:

As you can see, I want to know if the two outputs wil be the same. I suspect that they won’t be because although both outputs are effectively the same filter, one source is a 1% sample, and maybe the other source is a 100% sample but only delivering 1% tweets from that.

So can someone please clarify if both outputs are the same?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I would like to answer my question with the results of my findings.

I tested both side by side in the same time frame and concluded that the custom filter method, whilst it supports multiple filters does not provide enough tweets to create an interesting enough visualisation.

I think the only way to get something more interesting with concurrent filters is to look at other methods but I am wondering if its not possible. Maybe with a third party.

I have attached a screenshot of the visualisation tracking ‘barackobama’ The left is the custom filter, the right is statuses/filter.