Nice. Incidentally, similar techniques are often used in security breaches. I remember it both from the recent paper that guesses your SSN from you date of birth and other data (where it is used to extrapolate your SSN from those of dead people with a nearby date of birth), and in the recent paper on the rogue CA certificate, where it is used to guess the timestamp on the certificate to the exact second.
I highly recommend reading these two papers -- both attacks required a great deal of ingenuity to pull off, especially the second one.
ok, the other lame-ass brute-force long-term percentage-playing solution: buy mad badwidth, create tons of whitelisted twitter usernames, and continually send tweets with a url to a tweet id that hasn't occurred yet.
for instance, every tweet contains a url for tweet id 3149892792 (2000 more than the current most recent tweet on the public timeline at the time of this comment). once the system creates a tweet that overshoots the desired id, a new goal id is selected.
eventually, you'll get the right answer, especially if you can tweet a good percentage of tweets for a particular period of time.
No, you can set the in_reply_to id in the request using the same approach. Then it'd say "in reply to @myname", and the "in reply to" link would link to the same tweet.
It's funny because just yesterday (while driving or walking the dog... one of those times when the thoughts just wander) I was thinking about how one could start a series of tweets of the kind "This tweet is the copy of the previous tweet" with a way to start and stop the series while all still being true. And then thought there could be other kinds of challenges around that theme. Apparently there are.
This is silly because of the ease of URL shorteners.
1. Use a link with a unique keyword hash (you can check) eg http://bit.ly/hn_comment
2. Take the action, get the link
3. Make that link with the keyword hash
I highly recommend reading these two papers -- both attacks required a great deal of ingenuity to pull off, especially the second one.
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full
http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/