We are running into an issue with a small percentage of our users. We iterate through a users tweets, making a call to user_timeline, count=200 and max_id of the previous iterations last post id. Most of the time it works great up to 3200, but there are some cases where Twitter stops responding with the full 200 or any tweets at all.
Here's one case, we have a user with 680 tweets, so we iterate through his timeline 4 times, count=200 each time.
The last tweet from the third iteration has a date of 16 Oct 2012, but I can manually (in a browser) find older tweets, e.g. 31 Jul 2011.
Is there some issue we're unaware of? 3200 max tweets but only up to a certain date?
From the Twitter API docs:
The value of count is best thought of as a limit to the number of Tweets to return because suspended or deleted content is removed after the count has been applied.
Unfortunately the count isn't actually the amount of tweets you will retrieve but the maximum you could retrieve excluding certain content.