I've written a little heuristic automated spam detection and blocking service for twitter mentions.
The first check I perform on a mention is if the mentionee is following the mentioner. To do this, i'm using the $tweet->user->following attribute.
95% of the time, this is accurately true or false, but probably about 5% of the time, it's saying false even if the person is following them.
I've worked around this by, if it's false, doing a relationship looking up call (which is always accurate), but obviously thats one more API call i'd rather not have to make.
Updates
- Duplicate reported at https://dev.twitter.com/issues/211