Simon Willison’s Weblog

Is it possible to link to a Twitter user’s page with their user_id instead of their screen name?

21st November 2010

My answer to Is it possible to link to a Twitter user’s page with their user_id instead of their screen name? on Quora

You could always build your own URL to do this as part of your own application—something like http://your-twitter-app.example.... which does a Twitter API lookup for that user and then redirects to http://twitter.com/their-twitter.... You can cache the ID-to-screen-name lookups that you’ve made in the past (not forever though, remember people occasionally change their screen names).

Flickr have an endpoint that does this for photo IDs which is extremely useful: http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?...