Joe Stump, former Digg PHP god, has yet another side project that makes using the Twitter API one step simpler. It's called Tweetimag.es.
Instead of using the Twitter API to get a user's thumbnail (which requires an HTTP request from Amazon's S3 service, which isn't always reliable), you simply use this syntax:
http://img.tweetimag.es/i/[twitter username]_[size]
Stump is using a content delivery network to host his image files, and his service even comes with automatic resizing.
The images are cached so there is basically a 0% chance you'll see an empty avatar.
As of this morning, all of the Twitter thumbnail requests for wefollow.com are using Tweetimag.es.If you are building a Twitter application, don't bother with the Amazon URLs, use Stump's method for more reliable thumbnails.
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