Analysis of Twitter tweets, etc.
I am not very good at programming, so I will be hiring someone to do this for me, but I was wondering what you would see fit to get certain tweets from Twitter - perhaps using the search API, then parse them and link them to other tweets and then output them to a spreadsheet or similar. What I mean is it must be mySQP, RoR, C #, etc., as you can see, I know very little about such things!
Thanks for any answers - really appreciate!
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This is a very general question, so I'm afraid I can only give a very general answer.
What you describe can be done in most programming languages. C # or Ruby (you don't really need the rails part of that to build websites) would certainly be good candidates. Java, Python, etc. They can also do it. There are libraries to access the twitter api for all of these languages. Matching and outputting tweets to a spreadsheet is also quite language independent, as most spreadsheets will read comma-separated value files.
MySQL is a database and won't be a good candidate, you can do limited programming with most databases, but that's probably not what you want.
I first looked for a good programmer and then let him / her work in the chosen language. Finding good programmers is usually the hard part.
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I believe there is a twitter API for most major programming languages.
Personally, I would choose a high level language like python. Here is a link to the python-twitter interface outputting from there to other formats (XML, Spreadsheet, CSV) is pretty trivial.
I think it also depends on what kind of processing you want to do with the data.
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As already mentioned, this can be done easily in any language.
Personally, I would do it in Perl. In my experience, in all the bad typing that Perl has gotten over the years, it remains the best for word processing, and that sounds like what you want to do.
Perl also has a Net :: Twitter module that lets you access data from Twitter in a fairly trivial way. As an example, I present some code for Monitoring Hashtags with Perl and Net :: Twitter that I posted on my coding blog a couple of days ago. (I hope it will also be useful in combating Persian myths about Perl as a writing language ...)
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