what is the best way to get whitelisted for more than 360/hour API calls? I'm trying to do some network analysis and data mining and am held up by the API limit. I've applied about 4-5 times and have been denied each time.
My understanding is Twitter has basically stopped approving whitelistings. Unless you are in the 1% that has a genuine need they won't give it to you. Have you looked into using the Streaming API? http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api
I do in fact use the streaming api but that doesn't help with things I need, such as getting screen names based on a twitter id, and getting lists of followers for thousands of people at a time, in order to do some graph processing.
How are you getting user_ids without having the companion screen_name? You can get some extra API calls by proxying through http://apigee.com/. You will likely just have to delay some of the processing to stay withing the rate limit.