HACKER Q&A
📣 toddmorey

Thoughts on building an AI Twitter search tool?


Here's my dilemma: Twitter (to me) is fairly toxic and I get no joy in using it. However, it's still the best place I've found to find revenant news about topics I care about.

AI has had so many initiatives for creating content and pushing content into our feeds... seems really fun to think of how AI can help platform users for a change.

I'm hoping to build or find something that can search twitter for me and present a list of tweets, filtered on sentiment. Obviously a topic like "CSS" is full of rants and debates and self-promo, but I think current AI could actually do a reasonable job of surfacing the interesting bits.

Just curious if anyone could point me towards the "stack" they'd use for such a project. I'm a seasoned web developer but a bit novice about AI and struggling to sort where to begin. Many thanks for any replies! Plan to open source whatever I build for this.


  👤 JoeMayoBot Accepted Answer ✓
X has pretty good documentation, which includes a list of SDKs to work with their API. There are a couple that X produced and several more from the community.

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/tools-and-...

I wrote and maintained one of the community libraries for years. However, I'm in a holding pattern, waiting to see what will happen in the future. The API has a free level, but it's only useful in limited scenarios. To actually accomplish what you're trying to do would require a paid subscription. You'll need to match your requirements to their pricing to see if the economics work out.

My initial dilemma with continuing working on my open-source project was whether it was worth it to pay the subscription to maintain an open-source project that I'm providing for free. Also, if hobbyists are priced out, I'm not sure how I feel about providing an open-source project for corporations that can afford the API fees while using my library for free.