Count of Twitter hashtags in a 24-hour period?

Question

How do I get a count of the number of times a Twitter hashtag is used or mentioned in a 24-hour period?

An example use is the Livestrong/BreakCancer world record attempt. I'd like to tally the number of times the use of a hashtag is made in order to have some record on its proliferation.

Answer 1

Check out Trendistic or What the Hashtag?! (you need to register for this one but it is free)

EDIT 1

Tredistic has the option to switch between 24hrs, 7 days, 30 days, 90 or 180 days. However, after looking at Trendistic again it appears to only display the percentage not the actual number of tweets. What the Hashtag splits tweets in to days over a 7 day period, displaying the number of tweets on the graph.

EDIT 2

I have been looking at Twitter API documentation and it seems to me that there wouldn't really be a 100% reliable way to get all of the mentions of a hashtag.

These are my observations after reading the API docs:

• History is only available for 7 days.
• When using the Search API you can specify dates as parameters but not times. I am presuming that the API would convert 09/01/2011 to 09/01/2011 00:00:00 but I can't be sure
• Not all tweets are available via the API. Presumably because some of them will be protected.
• You can only return a certain number of tweets with API calls. So if you have a particularly successful hashtag which spread across Twitter you wouldn't be able to retrieve the actual number of tweets anyway.

Answer 2

Check out HashtagBattle

Answer 3

Friend of mine built this app called trends24. This one gives you worldwide trends in the past 24 hours along with a hour-by-hour trends

Answer 4

You need to do this :

1. Use twitter's streaming API to get realtime tweets.
2. Extract the "text" out of the JSON you get from the API
3. Extract the hashtags from the text, ( if you are using ruby , you can find gems for this)
4. Convert hashtags to uppercase, so you don't miss hashtags with mixed cases.
5. Filter these hashtags to find the hashtag you want to parse
6. Feed these hashtags to a rolling counter which has timewindow buckets which look like this : [bucket] => count. The buckets are cyclic , ie , you'll clear the count in the first bucket and use it as the next bucket if you are switching from the last bucket

You should have processes running with big time concurrency if you are planning to parse the streaming api's that fetch you all the tweets. You can use [Storm] for this.

I've put together an app that does something similar. I've open sourced it and you can find it here: http://www.emilsoman.com/tweetness . I looked at Tweitgeist and made this as my POC, it's basically a fork, removed a few things and added some of my own , like a Sinatra app for web UI.