o consider myself to be an equal opportunity coder. I like investigating different tools built in different languages to solve different types of problems. Recently at work I had the opportunity to play around with [elasticsearch](http://www.elasticsearch.org). Elasticsearch brings the whole distributed / non relational data craze to the world of search. It is actually a rather impressive piece of tech. If you are at all interested in search as a problem, I recommend you give it a look. In any event, I need to get some data into the search engine to play around with. Where could I get a good deal of data without doing the heavy lifting myself? Twitter! Sure the twitter activity stream.