Summary Question: "If a user is 'private' on Twitter, why can I see their followers on Twitter.com (IFF I log in) but not through the API?"
Details: For example, I went to http://twitter.com/just_me_hi/followers/ and can see all of her followers, despite the fact that she is "private" (Note: I can see them on twitter.com while logged in even when I am fairly certain that she blocked me before going private.) curl -D - -s -u user:pass "http://twitter.com/friendships/exists.xml?user_a=just_me_hi&user_b=tweetthief"; Results in: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Status: 403 Forbidden (irrelevant headers edited) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <hash> <request>/friendships/exists.xml?user_a=just_me_hi&user_b=tweetthief</request> <error>You do not have permission to retrieve following status for both specified users.</error> </hash> PLEASE NOTE: I tried the same API access from another account I am 99.9999% sure she did NOT block, and it still gives me this "permission error" so it does NOT appear to have anything to do with whether or not this account is "blocked" and everything to do with the fact that the account is marked "private"… I don't understand why the API gives me less access to information than the website. T.T. ps: @just_me_hi appears to have gone private after I (and others) called her out for plagiarism in violation of the Twitter TOS. You can see the chain of events here: http://tweetthief.tumblr.com/tagged/justmehi/chrono -- http://tweetthief.tumblr.com Shining a light on users who plagiarize on Twitter
