It would be more efficient to handle the parsing on the server side, but I assume you're building the site entirely using client-side technologies?
An example of some JavaScript code:
// Store your JSON data in a variable
var yourJSON = {
"animals": [
{"type": "dog", "name": "Paul"},
{"type": "cat", "name": "Ralph"},
{"type": "bird", "name": "Jim"}
]
};
// Retrieve and store specific data from the JSON
var PaulsType = yourJSON.animals[0].type; // Returns 'dog'
var BirdsName = yourJSON.animals[2].name; // Returns 'Jim'
When working with Twitter, there are multiple levels of nesting, so you need to access the data accordingly. For instance, if you want to retrieve information about your followers, the structure could look like this:
[{"statuses_count":527,"profile_use_background_image":true, ....
....
,"status":{"place":null,"retweeted_status": {"place":null,"coordinates":null,"retweet_count":"100+","truncated":false,"text":"BLAHBLAHBLAH" .....
This is just displaying an example at index 0. To extract the text of your most recent follower's tweet (in this case, a retweet to demonstrate encapsulation), you can use JavaScript like this:
var yourJSON = {insert Twitter output here};
var firstFollowersTweet_retweet = yourJSON[0].status.retweeted_status.text;
// To get the raw text whether it's a retweet or not
var firstFollowersTweet = yourJSON[0].status.text;
BOOM!