18147 tweets about the Toronto Mayoral election
Toronto Mayoral Election: @RobFordTeam vs @G_Smitherman vs @JPantalone
- Tweets with @RobFordTeam are in red.
- Tweets with @G_Smitherman are in purple.
- Tweets with @JPantalone are in teal
- Tweets mentioning two or more are multicoloured.
- Tweets mentioning none of them are transparent.
Tweets were gathered from searching via the api for:
#voteTO OR #RobFord OR #Smitherman OR #Pantalone OR “Rob Ford” OR “George Smitherman” OR “Joe Pantalone” OR @g_smitherman OR @robfordteam OR @jpantalone OR from:robfordteam OR from:g_smitherman OR from:jpantalone OR to:robfordteam OR to:g_smitherman OR to:jpantalone since:2010-10-24 until:2010-10-25
First version. Just highlighted Ford and Smitherman in red and blue.
Toronto Mayoral Election: Rob Ford vs George Smitherman
- Tweets with @RobFordTeam are in red.
- Tweets with @G_Smitherman are in blue.
- Tweets mentioning both are in black.
#VoteTO election night tweets
mferrier Nobody in Toronto can ever make fun of the US electing Bush ever again. #VoteTO
tapesonthefloor I, for one, welcome our new Marshmallow Man overlord. RT @coreypierceart ALL HAIL MAYOR STAYPUFT #fordTO #voteTO
johnpapa Can we PLEASE refer to Rob Ford as “Mayor Double Down”? He’s greasy, filled w/ cheese and generally bad for the health of the city. #voteTO
TonyClement_MP There are too many sore losers on Twitter. If your candidate got trounced stop blaming the electorate.
silentpat3d My students have #epicfail writing skills but they pale in comparison to Toronto’s #epicfail voting skills #voteTO
kimtarlo RT @sherm85: RT @JasonJHughes: Rob Ford is the Nickelback of Mayors. All the votes, yet no one admits to voting for him. #voteTO
sexytypewriter I just got back from Back to the Future and would like to fly the Delorean to 2014 when Adam Vaughan is Mayor of Toronto. #VoteTO
Baldy67 Outta the frying pan and into the deep fryer… #voteTO
newgoodbye 2010: we hosted the G20 and some idiots broke stuff, and then we elected Rob Ford. Santa’s going to fly right over us this year. #voteTO
thatsadandyidea #voteTO #cp24mayor Everytime I see Ford, I hear “in a van, down by the RI-ver”
jimpook Ppl leaving TO: Remember, Calgary is East - keep driving until you hit water, you’re almost there. #VoteTO
MrDisco3 Let hope cyclists get put out to pasture! #voteTO
wesolkowska Listening to @CBCNews Ford supporters saying without sarcasm, “the Tea Party has arrived in TO. Isn’t that great?” #VoteTO (head shaking)
DangerGirl6 Ok. Gotta Say It Again. ROB FORD IS TORONTO’S NEW MAYOR. WOOOOOOOT! NOW THAT IS REAL CHANGE!!! Way To Go TORONTO. #voteTO
southpawrighty They kicked the bums out!. I feel like this city will finally turn around. So tired of socialist policies and “green” projects. #voteTo
sharelle If enough people check in to Toronto on @foursquare, can Rob Ford be ousted as mayor? #voteTO #cp24mayor #fordpocalypse #unfordtunate
Twitter API: to cache or not to cache? When, why and how?
How do twitter-based apps access tweets going back several months? Do they keep data in dbs or do they re-search for tweets each time a visitor makes a query?
I’m asking because most of the playing around I’ve done with the twitter api has focused on the query functionatlity. This is a great way to pull in data but it is slow and I believe it would be much quicker if I had that data stored in a csv or db format. So the question I’m asking myself is whether I should be setting up a cron job that bakes out a csv or writes to a db once per day for the specified query strings. That would allow me to quickly pull in old tweets going back as far as I’d like. But this would mean that I would still need to write another set of methods to handle incoming queries not already in the daily cron list.
In looking at the Design Patterns section of the Twitter API FAQ, I came across this suggestion for caching:
“We recommend that you cache API responses in your application or on your site if you expect high-volume usage. For example, don’t try to call the Twitter API on every page load of your hugely popular website. Instead, call our API once a minute and save the response on your end, displaying your cached version on your site.”
Maybe this is the answer, but at what point does the traffic and response time warrant this approach? Lots of questions!
Edit:
Links
Tweets to TSV
I created a nice Twitter to TSV (tab separated values) program this weekend using Processing and Twitter4J. The challenge of working within the Twitter API rate limiting and parsing out the data turned out to be more interesting than the original idea I wanted to work on.
What’s great is that I now have a simple way to be able to create a large dataset of tweets for any search criteria I want to work on. My last test grabbed over 48000 posts tagged with #ukvote.
Currently it outputs to a tsv file but that could be easily changed to talk to an SQL database as well if that made sense.
