"Social applications aside, Twitter is also ideal for performing
all kinds of useful programmatic projects, from invoking web
services to creating link-lists to performing semantic analysis.
This becomes especially powerful when combined with something like
an XML database that can perform periodic queries of content and
retrieve only relevant pieces of information.
"This article walks through the creation of a RESTful data
application around an XML database, which will demonstrate how to
use the Twitter API and how to make such an API work using virtual
collections. This simple web application will periodically query
the Twitter API for new status messages from a chosen user's
account and download them to the database as XML, combining the XML
and Atom formats to give access to both. Twitter API and RESTful
Interfaces
"The Twitter API is remarkably simple to use, and it contains a
number of goodies for XML and JSON developers. The API allows
access to most of the primary feeds that Twitter provides,
including the general Twitter stream, an authenticated user's
personal and friends' streams, replies, personal messages, and
system-level status messages. For the most part, these are RESTful
interfaces. In essence, each URL is a collection of Twitter status
messages (known colloquially as tweets). You use HTTP GET
operations to receive a listing of tweets relevant to the
particular collection feed, POST operations to add a new tweet to
the appropriate collection, and DELETE to remove a tweet from a
collection. These are good examples of "virtual collections." The
tweet universe is in fact just a single table of tweets with these
different views representing different "filterings" of that single
list."
