how can i stream and store twitter's public timeline, particular user's tweets and tagged tweets?

I have to collect tweets from and for a certain period of time for analytic and research work with tools weka and tableau. Is there a direct way to collect them in xml or .csv format. any help in this regard will be highly appreciated. I am working on the model to find ranks for twitter users based on the response they get for their tweets. Earlier there was site 140kit.com having database collections which is not working now. Specifically i want to collect tweets and retweets for users in xml or .csv format for further analyzation through Weka or Tableau which will be more gross for me. I am neo in this area, can you provide any blog link开发者_如何转开发 to get started with search of API for users's retweets and tag words and where to begin with as i have no previous knowledge of scripting, python, or JSON?

When you say "from and for a certain period of time" do you mean the past or the future?

If you want to collect tweets from the past for keywords, you can use the search API for up to 5-7 days ago.

If you want to collect tweets for keywords starting at a certain time in the future, then you can use the streaming API.

If you want tweets in the past or future for a certain user, you can use the statuses/user_timeline method in the Rest API: http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/statuses/user_timeline

If you can explain your need in more detail, I'll provide a solution.

perhaps access to twitter's firehose would help?: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_faq#firehose