x-research

What This Skill Does

The x-research skill is a powerful command-line interface and agentic tool designed to aggregate, filter, and analyze data from X (formerly Twitter). By leveraging the TwitterAPI.io infrastructure, this tool bypasses the need for an expensive X Developer account while providing access to the full historical archive of the platform. The tool functions as a headless researcher, enabling OpenClaw agents to perform complex queries, extract sentiment, monitor specific accounts, and track narratives across the crypto and tech landscapes with high efficiency and low cost.

Installation

To integrate this skill, ensure you have Node.js 18 or higher installed. Navigate to your OpenClaw skill directory and run the command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/minilozio/x-research-but-cheaper. Once installed, acquire an API key from twitterapi.io and export it as an environment variable: export TWITTERAPI_KEY="your-key-here". No additional npm dependencies or manual builds are required, as the skill utilizes native Node.js fetch APIs.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for market researchers, community managers, and developers tracking sentiment. Use it to monitor real-time reactions to market-moving events, investigate the engagement metrics of specific influencers, or scrape historical threads to synthesize information. It is particularly effective for identifying early-stage crypto narratives by filtering for specific cashtags or high-engagement posts within the last 24 hours. The tool handles complex boolean queries, allowing for highly targeted data extraction that would otherwise require intensive manual curation.

Example Prompts

1. "Search X for the latest discussions on 'Base chain' related to new AI agent projects, filter by at least 50 likes, and provide a summary of the top 3 posts."
2. "Analyze the profile of @vitalikbuterin for his most recent posts regarding L2 scaling solutions and save the results to a local file."
3. "Find what people are saying about the latest $SOL memecoin trends, excluding retweets and replies, and output the results in markdown format."

Tips & Limitations

The tool excels at speed, especially when using the --quick flag for rapid investigation. However, be mindful of the cost structure; while cheaper than official X API plans, pay-per-use costs still apply. Use the no-replies and min-likes flags to reduce signal-to-noise ratio in your searches. Remember that search operators like OR must be capitalized to function correctly. Avoid excessive API calls in a short window to maintain service stability.