title: Incremental searching only from your follower in twitter API
body: <p>Is there a smart way using Twitter API to quickly <strong>incremental search</strong> twitter users <strong>only from your followers</strong>?</p>
  
  <p>For example, there is user Alice who is followed from one million users. One day, Alice wanted to send a DM to another user which is one of her followers, but she only remembered that the name of him/her starts from the letter 'Bo'. So she wants to filter her one million users name with prefix 'Bo'.</p>
  
  <p>How can Alice get all users using Twitter API, which name starts from 'Bo'?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Method 1. Call <code>followers/ids</code> 200 times and filter</strong> : Since <code>followers/ids</code> can get only 5,000 followers at a time, you should call <code>followers/ids</code> at least 200 times to get all one million followers. After that, you filter the users by name which starts from 'Bo'. This IS extremely slow because the filtering never starts until the 200 requests end. It's scalability is poor because it uses lots of memory to save and filter loaded follower list for each user.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Method 2. Call users/search many times and check if they're following me</strong> : Unfortunately, only the first 1,000 matches are available. Matches over 1,001 will never appear as your followers.</p>
  
  <p>I want to know if there is a better way than this. The following 2 methods are too stupid.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>P.S.
  Lady Gaga seems to be followed by 28 million users. <a href="https://twitter.com/ladygaga" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ladygaga</a></p>