The API docs say "100/hour", "please use if-modified-since", "basic auth only", and "xml, json, rss, or atom."
json is first-class in later versions of python, so let's use simplejson for now. That gives us an array of twits, which are just dicts; looks like I want t["text"] for the body, t["user"]["screen_name"] for the fake sender, and ignore the rest for now; maybe add the reply, location, or user.name in the zsig later, and maybe filter on user.protected if that actually turns out to mean something.
Since etag/if-modified-since seem reliable enough, I won't bother stashing messages at all, just history.
Yay brute force. 27m total including some manual testing.
Footnotes: