Hi all, thanks for your responses. John, I did take a look at the stream api but was put off by the big disclaimer saying it could change very frequently and be down for extended periods. Also, I was kinda trying to avoid the issue I was seeing in search where certain tweets were not being indexed - now perhaps this is because my test tweets unwittingly looked like duplicates (and not worthy of indexing) but it made me think "ok, is there a way to avoid this problem - scanning the users timelines seemed the way to go.
The streaming API looks interesting though and I get the idea of having a single connection - which in my case would be a shell based PHP script dumping the results to (say) a flat file for subsequent import/processing. I'll need to find some best practice PHP scripts - phirehose looked interesting. Can I check something with rate limits and streaming API? If I have 20K requests per hour this basically means I can use the streaming API 20K times per hour? Or is that too simplistic. Joel
