I have a Twitter “widget” on my site where I allow users to login and pull in their twitter details and home timeline. I’m using OAuth for this and I have a little concern over rate limiting. In my widget, I’m having to make 2 requests every time I need the latest data. One request for the users details (and latest status) (the top section of my widget), and a separate request for their home timeline (the bottom section of my widget). What I’m wondering is if there is a way to get both with a single request. It just seems like it’s a waste of requests to have to do it twice. Any way to do this or is this something I need to make a feature request for to Twitter? Does anyone else think that it would make sense for Twitter to always return the latest user details with each API request/result?
Your best bet is not to pull the user details with every refresh; cache it locally and only update the display of user details intermittently. Or give your use an option so they can control their own rate limit usage.