Analysis of Twitter Devices with R

Hello everybody!

Today I write about a short but pretty interesting topic. It is about analyzing which devices the Twitter users use and show them in a pie chart.

First of all, like always, we have to go through the authentification process I described here.

But then the fun can begin.

Getting the data

We start with searching on Twitter for Tweets containing a certain keyword. For my example I used “Social Media”.

tweets = searchTwitter("Social Media", n=20, cainfo="cacert.pem")

Analyzing the data

We now have our tweets and just have to get the information about the source out of them. It is like searching for a string.

devices <- sapply(tweets, function(x) x$getStatusSource())

devices <- gsub("","", devices)
devices <- strsplit(devices, ">")

devices <- sapply(devices,function(x) ifelse(length(x) > 1, x[2], x[1]))

Ok now we have our devices can put them in a nice looking pie chart like this one.

pie(table(sources))

Sometimes you can see interesting trends in the use of devices or maybe with a lot of luck you can find a new and unknown device.

Have fun!