Hello, I have spent a good portion of today reading through closed, merged, and open issues on http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list
I am trying to figure out the best way to get an accurate followers count. Initially, I was using /users/show which returns the full user object, including the followers_count item. However, I have noticed that this number only updates when the user posts a tweet. If the user has no new tweets, the follower count is not updated. Data I was pulling in was many days old. I understand the need to cache data, but being unable to pull up an approximate count of followers from the past several days is a problem. I have seen this issue posted many times, but it is always merged into issue 474, which appears to only deal with the following flag, and not the followers_count. There was one issue (which I can't find anymore) where there was acknowledgment that the users/show data was cached until a new post was made but no mention of any fix or solution. My next approach was to use the statuses/user_timeline. I wasn't sure if the user object for each status would have the "current" value or the value at the time of the status update. When I grabbed the xml formatted response, I got (starting from the most recent status and going back): 1686, 1653, 1685, 1685, 1685, 1685, 1685... Through the rest of the statuses, it stayed the same. Interestingly, 1686 is the current value listed on the website. 1653 was the value I got from /users/show. And I'm quite certain that the followers count did not stay constant at 1685. Moreover, when I grabbed the json version of statuses/user_timeline, I got entirely different results: 1653, 1653, 1683, 1675, 1652, 1661, 1644... This seems to reflect the current number of followers at the time of the status update, unlike the XML feed. Anyways, to get back to my original question. How do I get an accurate followers count for a user? Also, why are there still XML/ JSON discrepancies (I came across a few reported issues that said they had been resolved). Any help or suggestions would be very much appreciated! Thanks, Jason P.S. The account I was using for the above examples was DailyPHP
