Querying Social Media to Track People’s Movements and Discussions Via a Browser Interface

Abstract

Social networking is micro-blogging site where users post short text-based messages. These messages often relate to a particular topic, event or product and are frequently coupled with the authors’ opinion. This information provides an exciting opportunity for individuals and companies who might benefit from being able to collate and analyze the data to discover opinion on an item of interest. This paper reports on the outcome of a project that aims to produce a web page that queries the social Web (specifically Twitter.com and Foursquare.com.) through the available APIs to track people’s movements and the topic of their discussions.  Tweets will be the main data source and queries results will be ranked and sorted out by total frequency in a Web accessible MySQL database. The result shows that the system has been successful in achieving the set aims.