What is Twitter Scraping

[TODO] : Find illustration of a house

Imagine yourself standing outside a house with thick wooden walls with glass window that can’t be opened. You can see from the window that the house is filled with books. You can see a lone door that acts as the entrance for the house.

From the window, you noticed that there is book that catch your attention. Even though you don’t understand the language of the cover in the book, you want to get the book out of the house and read it.

How do you that ?

You can get and read the book in two simple steps :
To get the book, first you need to go through the entrance that is the door, open it, and get the book.
To read the book, you need to understand the language on how the book is written.

Those steps is exactly the same thing that you will do when you wanted to do twitter scraping. All you need to do is to replace the house with Twitter, and the books as Twitter data.

To get the Twitter data, then you will have to enter Twitter using the door, which is the Twitter API (Application Programming Interface). To actually read and understand Twitter data, you will have to understand how twitter data is structured. The information on how Twitter data is structured and written is available on the Twitter API as well.

To sum it up, you to get and understand Twitter data, you will need to use Twitter API, which is a defined way by Twitter to get its data in a programmatic and structural way. You can check more information on Twitter Developer page here (http://developer.twitter.com)

However, you need to keep in mind that Twitter API is designed to be computer to computer communication. Meaning, the data is not in a form that is easily readable by a human.

To turn it into a human readable format, we have to use create an application using a programming language that parses those data into information that we can understand. However, there is another way we can understand Twitter data, that is using a tool such as TAGS