I have a list of 5500 tweet ids. For each tweet id, I'm downloading the associated tweet text. The ids are non-sequential and from many different users.
The only API option I see for pulling a specific tweet is GET statuses/show/:id.
That gives only a tweet at a time. With rate limiting of 350 API calls / hr, that means ~16 hrs to download the data.
Is there an API call or better technique that I'm missing?
No. I'm afraid none. There's no way to bypass twitters 350 API Calls per hour for authenticated users.