Twitter APIs: Hacking tools

In my last post I introduced the Twitter REST APIs while sprinkling in a bit of history and providing some information on using Twitter’s Twurl console.

This time I want to highlight some additional development tools to help you be productive programming against Twitter’s APIs.  Let’s take a whirlwind tour through hacking Twitter with Apigee’s Twitter console, YQL, Infochimps, and GNIP technologies.

First up, Apigee’s Twitter console.  This is similar to the Apigee PayPal and Facebook consoles I’ve written about here before.  Apigee’s consoles make API exploration, learning, and call prototyping a quick and easy thing to do.  Their Twitter console is a great way to start using the Twitter API immediately, similarly to using Twurl.  But if you learn how to use Apigee’s console, you can take the same generalized skills over to other Apigee provided consoles including the PayPal console mentioned above.  It’s worth the little bit of time required to get up to speed, in my opinion.  Click here to try it out for yourself.

I’ve written a lot about YQL and Infochimps recently, including a how-to on using Infochimps’ Twitter influence metrics API via YQL.  YQL allows you to use SQL-like queries to access a wide variety of web APIs including Twitter’s, while Infochimps provides a number of Twitter stream and data related datasets via their data market.  I’d encourage you to read my previous posts and articles on both subjects to see how you can use them in your Twitter development.

Click here to read the full article on the PayPal X Developer Network including information on drinking from GNIP-provided Twitter firehose streams and a fantastic O’Reilly book that will give you recipes for hacking on Twitter data.