Learning the Twitter API: Some Facts

Here some good facts to know about the Twitter API:

• Twitter has 2 discrete REST API(s)
• Search API - Allows developers methods to interact with Twitter Search and trends data.
• REST API-Allows developers to access core Twitter data like updated timelines, status data, and user information
• Twitter has 1 Streaming API
• Streaming API- Provides developers with near real-time high-volume access to Tweets in sampled and filtered form.
• The Twitter API is RESTful and it supports the following data formats.
• XML
• JSON
• RSS
• Atom
• There is a rate limit imposed on all 3 types of APIs.
• You can only have 150 API requests per hour for the REST API.
• The Search API has a higher rate limit then 150 requests per hour.
• The Streaming API has a rate limit appropriate for long lived connections.
• The Twitter API is HTTP based
• Methods that receive data from the Twitter API requires a GET request.
• Methods that submit,change, or destroy data the Twitter API requires a POST request.