How to read and scan twitter's public timeline in ruby on rails?

I'd like to read twitters public timeline scanning it for the occurence of a specific word. When开发者_开发问答 someone says it, I'd like to automatically respond. Is this feasible using the twitter api? Where to start?

Thanks Thomas

---

It seems that you want to decouple your Rails application from the traditional HTTP request-response cycle. What you probably want to do is implement a background job which periodically calls the Twitter API and does something if the word you're looking for is found.

As for the actual Twitter API call you need to use, I suggest you start by looking at the Twitter Search API.