Recently I’ve started exploring extended Twitter conversations using data captured from my Twitter Archiver Google Spreadsheet (think I going to rename this TAGS) and one of the problems was “The user ids in the Search API are different from those in the REST API … This defect is being tracked by Issue 214. This means that the to_user_id and from_user_id field vary from the actualy [sic] user id on Twitter.com”

Twitter have announced [H/T @psychemedia] that this problem is now fixed so it made sense to start getting the right user ids as part of the opt-in now rather than weight for November. While I was updating the code it also made sense to also include an option to get the Tweet Entities, which additional pieces of metadata like urls and hashtags detected by twitter. These don’t appear to be fully enabled yet, but I’ve already added a new column entities_str in the TMP sheet to capture these (if you don’t want these just delete the column from TMP). Because entities are objects of varying length for now I’m just recording them as a JSON string.

A couple more updates are the addition of a ‘time’ column. This just converts the tweet date/time into a spreadsheet friendly format to make doing calculations easier.

There are also some easter eggs in the code. The main ones are the code I use to grab ViralHeat sentiment analysis of tweets and some code to generate data for my Protovis gadget.   

To get the latest version of this spreadsheet use the link in the original Collect/backup tweets in a Google Spreadsheet [Twitteralytics v2]

Last updated by Martin Hawksey at July 12, 2012.