In some applications, it could be cool to have a feature that enabled the user to quickly get a glimpse of what people are saying on Twitter about the user or their product, service, company etc.

For instance, a service like GetSatisfaction.com has a feature just like that. They call it Overheard, and this is what it looks like:

There’s nothing like Twitter to give you feedback. I think MediaTemple felt the effect of unhappy customers on Twitter when their servers broke down, and stayed there for more than two days!

Anyway. I wanted to search from C#, and get back a DataTable. Here’s how it’s done:

    /// <summary>
    /// Searches Twitter for the specified query.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="query">The query.</param>
    /// <returns>Returns the search results as a DataTable</returns>
    public DataTable Search(string query)
    {
      DataTable dt = new DataTable();
      dt.Columns.Add("text");
      dt.Columns.Add("html");
      dt.Columns.Add("pubdate");
      dt.Columns.Add("id");
      dt.Columns.Add("link");
      dt.Columns.Add("authorname");
      dt.Columns.Add("authorlink");

      XDocument tweetResults = XDocument.Load(String.Format(

      "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q={0}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(query)));

      XNamespace atomNS = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";
      var q = from tweet in tweetResults.Descendants(atomNS + "entry")
              select new
              {
                Text = (string)tweet.Element(atomNS + "title"),
                Html = (string)tweet.Element(atomNS + "content"),
                DatePublished = DateTime.Parse((string)tweet.Element(atomNS + "published")),
                Id = (string)tweet.Element(atomNS + "id"),
                Link = (string)tweet.Elements(atomNS + "link")
                .Where(link => (string)link.Attribute("rel") == "alternate")
                .Select(link => (string)link.Attribute("href"))
                .First(),
                Author = (from author in tweet.Descendants(atomNS + "author")
                          select new
                          {
                            Name = (string)author.Element(atomNS + "name"),
                            Uri = (string)author.Element(atomNS + "uri"),
                          }).First()
              };
      
      foreach (var item in q)
      {
        dt.Rows.Add(item.Text, item.Html, item.DatePublished, item.Id, item.Link, 

                    item.Author.Name, item.Author.Uri);
      }

      return dt;
    }