Basically what I’d like to do is request a users public timeline (including retweets) without having to use authentication, but with rate limiting applied to my application and not the IP.
I want to run this request (for several different screen names):
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=stephenfry&include_rts=1&trim_user=1
against the API, but I’m behind a proxy/firewall that basically causes thousands of users to share the same IP which means that my ip is almost always rate limited. Is it possible to insert my API key into the request somehow (header, part of the query string) and have rate limiting on it and not the ip?
I really don’t want to go through the full OAuth authentication mechanism for each user as this would require their interaction and I only wish to read their public feed.
I have implemented local caching for the tweets so it will at most make 4 requests per hour/username, but this does me little good when the ip is rate limited from the start.
Can this be done and if so how would I do it?
Edit: I should add that using the Search API is not possible as it will not return any tweets for some of the users (tweets are too old).
There is no form of application-only identity on the Twitter API. To make an authenticated request, you must have a user context. If your integration is purely server-side, you could utilize a single access token representing your own account and make signed, authenticated requests that way. I would not recommend any kind of hard coded tokens in a client-side or distributed environment. You may want to take a look at what’s possible using the Streaming API and it’s follow filter — allowing you to stream public tweets by specific users in real time.