It looks like the retweet_count value is invalid. Here is what I do for 32 possible 2012 candidates: 1. Each hour I get all tweets from statuses/user_timeline. They each fit within the 3,200 limit. 2. Collect the value of retweet_count for all tweets for each candidate. 3. Sum these values to get the total retweets of the candidate's tweets. 4. Compare this to the previous hour to see how many retweets they got.
The whole thing takes about 32 API calls, so its lightweight. The total retweet count for @barackobama's tweets has been jumping back and forth between 79,730 and 80,648 since 5:00pm ET. I have to believe this is broken. Now that I really understand the new RTs, I will be getting these values myself from the streaming API, which I use anyway for these accounts. I can keep my own counts and not max out at 100 RTs per tweet. -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
