problem with twitter api friends_timeline

Question

i can get my user_timeline fine:

curl -u user:pwd http://www.twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/user.json

{blob of tweets}

but when i try to get the friends_timeline, i get an auth error:

curl -u user:pwd http://www.twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.json

{"request":"\/statuses\/friends_timeline.json",
 "error":"Could not authenticate you."}

do i just not understand the documentation?

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#friendstimeline

Answer 1

please disregard. my password was incorrect, but it turns out that user_timeline does not require authentication, so the problem was masked until i tried a feature that required auth.

Answer 2

check this blog post http://webhkp.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/twitter-api-search-follow-tweet/ . i think this will help you.