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Owing to the fact that Twitter have recently overhauled their API, I'm trying to think of ways to get my Zend CMS application to access the public timelines of clients. I'm currently using this:

$twitterSearch = new Zend_Service_Twitter_Search('json');
$output = $twitterSearch->search("from:$username", array('rpp' => $total, 'page' => $page));
return $output['results']; 

To return the required data - this works without a hitch. The problem, however, is that it only seems to be returning very recent tweets. Looking at their documentation for the Twitter Search API, they specify a time limit of just 6-9 days of data being available for use.

A lot of clients have timelines with old tweets (some from early 2012) which they want displayed. Is there any other way, apart from the Twitter Search API, that I can access third party timelines? I've looked into Zend's other Twitter features but they only seem concerned with accessing sensitive data that requires oAuth authentication (direct messages, friends, posting to your timeline, etc.). I just want to access the public timelines for a particular username. Is this possible?

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Yeah, you'd think that with all of the data twitter collects, we'd be able to search and archive everything as we please, but I guess they're pretty hellbent on "streaming data" rather than old data. Have you looked at this? blog.tweetsmarter.com/twitter-search/… –  Boeckm Oct 24 '12 at 12:52
But why are you running a search when you need tweets from a particular user? You can use the user_timeline feature instead. That'll show the last 'n' number of tweets from the user regardless of how old the tweets are. Because when you search, you get only 6-9 days of tweets, and if a user has not tweeted in about two weeks, you get nothing. –  Arjun Abhynav Oct 24 '12 at 13:02
@ArjunAbhynav Their new API (v 1.1) only allows you to access user_timeline with oAuth. I wanted to avoid using oAuth if at all possible. –  hohner Oct 24 '12 at 13:33
Oh yes, that is there. Well but now with the rate limits, it is nearly impossible to avoid using oAuth, unless you cache results. It was a really bad move by Twitter. I can already see that a million Twitter widgets in blogs and what not, have stopped working. –  Arjun Abhynav Oct 24 '12 at 14:13

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