From http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-user_timeline:

Note: For backwards compatibility reasons, retweets are stripped out of the user_timeline when calling in XML or JSON (they appear with ‘RT’ in RSS and Atom). If you’d like them included, you can merge them in from statuses retweeted_by_me.

Huh. So in other words, making a call like this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=mmacaulay&count=1

might give you an empty result. Sneaky. Even if you increase the count parameter there or remove it altogether, you might end up with an empty result if the user does nothing but retweet things. If you want to see the same thing as you’d see by viewing the user’s timeline on twitter.com you’ll have to make an extra call to retweeted_by_me.

Dear Twitter developers: it would be nice if instead of stripping out the retweets you did one of two things:

• If I make a request with count=n, return the first n non-retweet statuses
• Allow me to specify whether or not retweets are included in the response via another parameter

Oh well. It’s Friday.