mroth / recyclebin

:recycle: measures usage of a particular term on twitter

♻️ recyclebin

A tool to measure usage of a particular term on Twitter.

Why "recyclebin"?

Because my primary motivation to write it was figuring out what's going on with the ♻️ symbol on Twitter. (But you can use it to measure anything via the -term=FOO option.)

See the article I used it for here: https://medium.com/@mroth/why-the-emoji-recycling-symbol-is-taking-over-twitter-65ad4b18b04b

Screenshot

Here be dragons

This was written as a quick one-off program to just grab some data for an article. Please treat the code with that understanding. :-)

Using this yourself

Compile, set the appropriate Twitter API keys as environment variables and run! See --help for available options. If you need more assistance, ping me or open an issue and I'll make this more obvious.

Please note that I have full Partner level access to the Twitter Streaming API on Emojitracker’s dev account — if you don’t, when you try to use this script to track anything super high volume, tweets will be dropped from your results, and your numbers will reflect a sampling rather than "everything". Plan accordingly.