The method Brian describes is essentially what I have been using for the past four weeks, tapping the Search API atom feed at intervals (every three hours), using since_id to pull everything since the last saved tweet ID.
Since Sept. 21, tweet volumes from this method have dropped 99 percent. The only tweets coming through are those for which domain searches appear in the body text of the tweet. This behavior is consistent across all six domains I am searching. Spot checks of domain searches do very occasionally show returns of tweets with shortened URLs that point to these domains, and that do not mention the domains specifically in the body text, as they should, but for the most part this is not the case. Even when some of these results are returned, scanning down the complete list of returned tweets shows that shortened URLs will have been parsed only for the first few returned results, and the rest of the results returned revert to the non-parsing behavior, presumably because of the use of cache. Refreshing on these searches, and scanning down the results, will show this behavior: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=pcworld.com And refreshing on Twitter's search page will show the same behavior, with very occasional flickers of the "expand" option for shortened URLs coming through. For the most part, however, it will not to showing the "expand" option. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pcworld.com Still seems like there's something amiss here. -- 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
