It would be nice if the http://twitter.com/[friends|followers]/ids.format uri's could return a bit more useful info like the screen_name. I'm new to using the api but my understanding of how to do this would be to have to make 1 call to the graph method and then iterate over each id and call http://twitter.com/users/show/id.format but overhead of doing that grows exponentially with the number of friends/followers a user has. Esp. when all I want is the screen_name. The show method packs quite a bit of data for each user.
What is the best way to accomplish getting a list a given users friends names while pulling the least amount of data? A suggestion might be http://twitter.com/[friends|followers]/ids/{screen_name}.format?incl= screen_name,other_attribute,some_other_attribute where the default the response is just returns the ids and when requested via some comma delimited param, adds a limited and predefined list of available attributes that can be pulled or an error status of that list contains attributes not available. I realize this would break the semantic of the method's name, 'ids', but maybe it could be encoded in element attributes http://twitter.com/friends/ids/{screen_name}.xml?incl= screen_name might yield <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ids> <id screen_name="foo">1</id> <id screen_name="bar">2</id> </ids> I'm not sure how that would be rendered as json Currently is this just [1,2,3,4] which packs a very lite payload maybe [{id:1,screen_name:'foo;},{id:2,screen_name:'bar'}]
