First off, you might want to make sure that your initialize method does what you want it to do
change
initialize: function() {}
to
initialize: function() {
BaseModel.prototype.initialize.apply(this, arguments);
}
This is because Backbone does not provide inheritance everywhere.
Secondly, I'm sure you're going to have a nice error like
XMLHttpRequest cannot load
http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=obama. Origin web.myapp.local
is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.
so instead you'll have to use JSONP and you can ready about that on the twitter API page: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/things-every-developer-should-know. You basically append a querystring callback=MyCallbackFunction