j-j.co.za

I have been interested in analysing various Twitter stats and producing lists of top twitter users (j-j.co.za/toptwits) for some time now and been using various tools to do so. This has been challenging and the results I have been producing have been limited as a result. The tool I have used most is NodeXL,which is more for mapping social networks but has the side effect of being able to download “extended statistics” for each of the Nodes (people) on the network. This however does not give me all of the information I wanted and also works on screen names rather than the Twitter ID’s, so if someone changes their name they fall off my list.

Searching on-line I found that Google Docs spreadsheet provides a function ImportXML which a number of people have been using to bring XML results into a spreadsheet. It appears to have some limits (50 calls per document) which at the time seemed problematic since I was wanting to work with much larger lists. I know better understand some of the Twitter API calls so that limit is less extreme than I first though. Nonetheless I wanted to work in Excel as I am more comfortable with it.

I found online that Excel can import an XML document, and that you can enter a URL there, which includes the ability to enter the Twitter API calls directly. Using the macro recorder I then figured out the calls and put some basic scripting around it to take a column of screen names, break it up into batches of 25 and then execute the XMLImport function for each batch and insert the results into the sheet.

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