[neilkod]

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.

[abraham]

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.