he Getting Started with the Twitter API article described how Twitter's founders see it as more than simply a web site where people can send short messages to those who choose to follow their message stream. Twitter is a new kind of publishing platform, and the simple, straightforward API for this platform is easy to use with a variety of tools and programming languages.
Tweeting Big Jumps in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
On a normal day last September, I would never check the Dow Jones Industrial Average. With the financial turmoil of recent months, though, I wondered more often whether the economy was getting us in deeper or if things had bounced back, so I checked too often, usually at CNBC's home page. When I did this, I often wondered if there was a simple way to receive alerts when the Dow made newsworthy jumps.
Checking stock and financial index quotes is pretty simple with any scripting language, so I used the python-twitter API to write a script that checks the Dow and posts a Twitter message (or "tweet") if the figure moves at least 50 points since the last check. The script is about 60 lines of code, which, in addition to basic file I/O, determines whether the DOW went up or down since the last check, and assembles a sentence describing what happened.
Read the entire article.
