For web developers just breaking into social media there are dozens of fantastic APIs you can work with. Most notably the Twitter API has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. And such rightly so, as the developers at Twitter have been working nonstop to improve endpoints and other miscellaneous settings.

The API has also been online long enough that 3rd party developers have created their own web apps and released the code as open source. In this tutorial I’ll be working with exactly this type of open source jQuery plugin called tweet! which can pull recent tweets from any user account. The plugin also comes with some default styles which we’ll play around with. We could also pull tweet data from searches, lists, and favorites as well.