Support for user id based status updates?

[bobber205]

Here’s the issue I’m having pretty frequently.

Say I have a list of 100 twitter screen names/usernames I wanna send a tweet to using the Rest API.

A certain number of these people (likely only a handful at most) will have changed their screen name. Sa
When I send a tweet with the status message of “@oldscreenname here is your award!” the tweet appears in the posting user’s timeline because @oldscreenname was changed to @oldscreenname2 or something like that.

Could it be possible to address a tweet at a user using their user id which never changes? Checking for a new username everytime I’m about to send a message really hurts, not to mention is impractical because of API limits sometimes.

[abraham]

Mentions of users in status text only supports @screen_name. However the GET users/lookup lets you take 100 user_ids and get their full user object in a single API request. That’s a easy method of validating screen_name values quickly.

[bobber205]

I totally get the workaround – it’d just be super convenient for another more practical option.
Our users often have HUGE limits on their status update calls but the user lookup is always much smaller.