If a user has protected updates, a call to /friendships/exists returns a 403. That, combined with an empty or inaccurate "following" value in the user data returned by the API means that there's no way for a client to get the current following status of a protected user.
(It can't be inferred by the 403 error either: the requester may be following, but it might not have been approved by the person being queried.) >From what I can tell, the basic probem is that friendships really have three states now: following, not following and pending. It would be nice to have the /friendships/exists API method (or something similar) could provide this state so it can be represented correctly in a client application. -ch
