Retrieve random tweet from the index (new API call)
Deploy a new API call to retrieve a random tweet from the index. Would be an important asset for characterization studies.
Anonymous
shared this idea
3 comments
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Matti Nelimarkka
commented
I'd like to use this kind of API to collect random data based on a particular profile, such as people from country X in Twitter. It would allow us to study Twitter, not in event-centric or user-centric manner, but on the everyday use, currently understudied.
The detailed characteristics could follow those available for advertisers.
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Anonymous
commented
Hi, thanks for your follow up.
Being able to randomly sample from a collection allows unbiased characterization studies otherwise impossible from the outside. If you don't have access to the complete collection, crawling methods introduce a bias.
Having access to random tweets using the API would eliminate this bias. A lot of studies based on Twitter data are targeted at characterizing user behavior (e.g., topic attention, social graph properties). How are these studies influenced by the crawling strategy adopted?
In a nutshell, to understand the Twitter ecosystem, its properties and dynamics, we need to be able to obtain samples from the collection uniformly at random.
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Adam Tornes
commented
Thank you for your submission. Would you mind elaborating and helping us better understand the value of such functionality? It's not immediately evident to us the value delivering a single random tweet might provide.