Axel Bruns beat me to it. Yes, I would advise YourTwapperkeeper for data collection as well. I've been using it for a while and am very pleased with it. Things are indeed very well described in the First Monday manuscript: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticl... As for handling the data, I prefer to use SPSS. Yes, a statistical tool. But I use it primarily to handle the data. Also I use SPSS to match external data to the Twitter data. The data Twitter provides are of course somewhat limited. However if one taps into external data sets one is able to enrich Twitter data for more advanced analyses. Also, SPSS has recently incorporated many text handling features to create new variables based on text strings. It thus also allows for creating your own metrics because - as Axel Bruns states - Twitter's metrices are biased. See my blogpost: http://blog.mauricevergeer.nl/2011/04/18/bias-in-twitter-api-measurements/ As for Big Data analysis: without going for the Big Data, the number of observations already increases rapidly anyhow. See my presentation held at WAPOR Amsterdam: http://www.slideshare.net/maver/candidates-communication-patterns-on-twitter. SPSS can easily handle large amounts of data. As for large networks, I would recommend Pajek: http://mrvar.fdv.uni-lj.si/pajek/. They even released another version Pajek XXL for very very large networks. Finally I know R the statstical / programming software also has a Twitter package (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/twitteR/index.html). Have tried it once, but because I am noy (yet) an R-expert haven't used it since then. The advantage of using it in R would be that one cold stay within a single software environment. R also has text ( http://gking.harvard.edu/readme) and several network analytical packages. HTH Maurice . ___________________________________________________________________ Maurice Vergeer To contact me, see http://mauricevergeer.nl/node/5 To see my publications, see http://mauricevergeer.nl/node/1 ___________________________________________________________________