Twitter dashboard exercises

This is a dashboard for displaying real-time information from a stream of tweets. The source data is a recording of tweets during the recent Australia vs India World Cup semi final - a topic we can expect lots of tweets on.

Setup

Choose between running your code or the sample solutions, so you can compare the results.

Run my solutions Run sample solutions

Hit Start to begin the tweet stream. You can control the speed of the stream with the slider. You can stop and restart at any time.

Speed: 1x

Exercise 1 - Slowing things down a bit

The tweets arrive so quickly, we can't read them! Let's take a tweet from the stream every ten seconds instead. We saw an operator from the previous exercises that could help here.

Recent tweet:

Exercise 2 - Measuring tweet activity

How much twitter activity are we seeing? How does the level of activity change over time? Let's get a count of the number of tweets per minute.

Tweets per minute:

Exercise 3 - Picking out interesting tweets

We've got a lot of data in each tweet - the author, number of followers, number of retweets and favourites, etc. Let's pick out specific tweets that are likely to be interesting. This might be useful for someone deciding which tweets to show during a broadcast.

Start with a threshold of 100,000 followers, 100 retweets or 100 favourites. But this is a good exercise to experiment with.

A couple of optional extras to think about to do with retweets:

How can we use the original tweet, not the retweet, so we see the original author?
How can we filter out duplicates when someone retweets a tweet we've already displayed here?