I want to gather very basic public info on Twitter users (#followers etc) from a web page. Visitors to the page will ideally be able to enter any handle and see that person's # followers, date they joined, etc -- all stuff visible from the public Twitter.com/username page.
Until recently, it was very easy: Getting public user info did not require authentication under the 1.0 version of the API.
As we all know, the 1.1 version does require OAuth, which cannot be safely accessed just on a client. I do not have access to a server for this project.
But I noticed, on inspecting the page communicate for Twitter's "follow me" buttons, that their own script hits the api at this endpoint:
https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json
I am able to query this endpoint with JSONP from a page with custom parameters, but I cannot determine (try as I might) whether this is permissible, and whether it would work on a large scale.
Twitter says not to rely on this method.
As of this writing, it does work, however.