How many tweets would your code crunch if it could crunch Twitter, or why holidays are bad for using Twitter’s streaming API

Twitter has emerged as a convenient source of data for those who want to explore social media. The company provides several access endpoints through APIs. There is a REST API for collecting past tweets and a streaming API for collecting tweets in real time. R has libraries for working with both. As is usual in data collection, the catchphrase is “more” – we want more tweets, ideally all that are relevant to our research question. While REST API is rate-limited (a user can submit 180 requests per 15 minutes, with each request returning 100 tweets), the streaming API holds a promise of delivering much more. The nagging question, though, is “how much?”

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