I want to add a section to a web page that will contain a scrolling list of the latest Tweets on a particular subject. How can this be accomplished?
If it is always the same subject, would it be as easy as embedding a web page within a web page with the URL:
http://topsy.com/s?q=%23marktwain
(replacing "marktwain" with whatever the subject is)?
One of the issues you'll face is the need to use OAuth on all your queries, which is required by Twitter API v1.1. Twitter has deprecated v1.0 of the API and will start doing blackouts before shutting it down next month. I don't see any Web page widgets on Twitter's Web page to do this either.
If you embedded this in a Web page, you would need a JavaScript OAuth library, which also means that your credentials must be in your Web page - an insecure approach.
Silverlight is a possibility, but Microsoft's focus on HTML/JavaScript leaves it's future in a questionable state. Besides, someone could also decompile the component and get your credentials, which is also not secure.
This leaves a server-side solution as the best possibility. You could handle this via pull or push. SignalR would be a good approach for push, but the tradeoff is that you need a continuously running process for immediate updates. If you run your own server, you could run a process via Windows Service that either does periodic Search queries, or uses a Filter Stream and uses SignalR to push results to the page. In the pull approach, your page can run a timer with an Ajax query back to the server, collecting new tweets and displaying them on the page. These are just a couple ideas, but provided to give you an idea of how you might approach the problem.
Twitter has a list of Libraries you can use. I wrote LINQ to Twitter, which also supports Twitter API v1.1.