Twitter Streaming API vs. Twitter Search for live events streaming

Question

I am going to be providing a twitter feed inside and Android app that allows re-tweets, favorites and reply to the tweet. I understand that there is a search api and also a streaming api. This is a major live event and I was just wondering if the search api is the way to go or if streaming api might be better.

So basically inside the live event android app, I have a twitter feed that will be read allowing users to re-tweet etc. So its like a little twitter client within the app. Is streaming the way to go here, or is it more trouble than its worth, and the search api is better with some type of polling?

Answer 1

If you want to show live results, you should definitely go with streaming api. There is a chance that you might miss some data if the tweet rate about your event is too high, but if it is a local event I don't think you might hit that rate (if the tweet rate of your keyword set exceeds 1% of the global traffic then you might starting missing some tweets). For retrieveing the missed tweets you can run twitter search in background process periodically to retrieve the last tweets arrived during the time interval of the event.

So best approach would be to run streaming api and check whether you are missing any tweeets, twitter will notice you about this tweets by sending track limitation notice to you. So in that case you might run in parallel twitter search too.

The most important think for such cases is to determine the best possible keyword set for your event. If your keyword set is too broad then you might end up retrieving noise data, so choosing the keyword set wisely can save you lots of time and improve the performance and usability of your system.