Twitter Libraries

[eluser]darkhouse[/eluser]
Let me be clear up front. I don't like twitter. I think it's a waste of time, and I can't get over the fact that it's so popular. Maybe I'm just too lazy to care about it. But nonetheless, my clients use it. I'll apologize in advance for my little rant.

I've seen a few twitter libraries here, and generally they all work the same way. The one that I had trouble with was this one by Elliot Haughin. I wasn't able to get the oAuth stuff working, simply because changing the uri_protocol to PATH_INFO broke everything. I have some ajax stuff working, and well it stopped working when I changed it to PATH_INFO. To be honest, I'm not even really sure what the oAuth stuff is for, why do I need to create an application on twitter, and why do I need to authorize my site to use the application?...

My problem is, I'm trying to get the contents of this page on a site. Now, if I use the user_timeline method, I only get posts made by this user. I don't get any retweets. If I just use the RSS feed that's available, I get everything, except the longer tweets are truncated. They're actually truncated if you're viewing that page and not logged in to twitter. However, if you ARE logged in, you'll see the full tweet, but still the longer tweets in the RSS feed are truncated.

Is this just a major flaw with twitter? Is it possible to get the full tweets using the oAuth solution? It's just silly why I have to jump through hoops to get some content to work properly. It's not like I'm building some crazy app to integrate with twitter... I just want the feed that's on their twitter page. Should be simple.

Any ideas? Thanks.