Get Twitter User Details without Authentication

Question

I have noticed some Twitter Applications manage to get a particular users Location, Name, Profile Image etc using just the twitter username?

Hows is this possible?

I ask because I have not come across any where in the Twitter docs on how you can do this. I can get a users details myself using oAuth when the user provides my app permission but thats it.

Would be grateful if this could be cleared. I hope its not the use of CURL as this is not a good idea in my eyes. If there is another way, is there a PHP implementation that I could use.

Thank you for any help.

Update

I did not know that existed! Is there a PHP wrapper or class someone has written to use that ? Sorry, I am complete noob and I relay on wrappers and simple function calls!

Answer 1

It's returned by the users/show call from the API.

For example: http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=dougw

The API wiki lists a PHP library FWIW.

Answer 2

If you use the URL located on this page :
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-users%C2%A0show

You should be able to call the API without authentication.

UPDATED:

Here are the set of Twitter Libraries: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Libraries