Find tweets by app

Question

I need to find all tweets made by a defined app.

I discovered the "source" search operator that allows to do that.

For example, here is the URL of the search to find all tweets made with Tweetbot for iOS: https://twitter.com/#!/search/source%3ATweetbot_for_iOS

The problem is I need to get the result as JSON or XML. Here is what is indicated on the Twitter search API documentation

1. Run your search on twitter.com/search.
2. Copy the URL. For example: https://twitter.com/#!/search/%40twitterapi
3. Replace https://twitter.com/#!/search/ with http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=. For example: http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%40twitterapi

It gives us http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=source%3ATweetbot_for_iOS which returns

error: "Invalid query"

Any idea?

Answer 1

The answer is found on the Twitter search API documentation

source

• can only be combined with a keyword parameter. If you do not include a keyword you will receive an HTTP 403 error with the message: {"error":"You must enter a query."}.
• supports multi-word sources by using _ instead of spaces. For example, the source "Tweet Button" should be entered as source: tweet_button

Therefor you must include a keyword. You can't get all the tweets from a source, you can only get all the tweets from the source which including a keyword, for example FBI:

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=fbi&source%3ATweetbot_for_iOS

Answer 2

Why you get the error message, @mhoran_psprep explained that. Now if you still want to achieve something like that, the closest thing is to choose a keyword, that is likely to appear in every other tweet and search with that + the source. There is no word like that, so I chose a letter. :P

I searched with the letter a and the source as tweetdeck.

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=a%20source:tweetdeck

The search works. The character a is likely to appear in most tweets. You can choose any other letter too. See if this works for you too. :)