Twitter API: Search followers tweets

Question

Is there any way to search for a term within a user's followers' tweets only. Search API is global, apparently. I want to search only within the user's followers.

Is there a way of doing this. Even a hugely complex one will be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can retrieve the IDs of the user's followers with GET http://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/ids.json?screen_name=<username>. Each ID corresponding to a user, you can now download the tweets of each follower with GET http://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?user_id=<follower ID>. I recognize that it requires lots of requsets to the Twitter API (which are rate limited) but you cannot do better with this API.