Twitter problem solved - bad Twitter!

I got a bug up my ass this afternoon to figure out why Twitter was giving me a 406 response when fetching my updates feed. To recap, I could get the feed successfully from the browser but not from the command line.

Inspecting the request headers sent by the browser (thanks to Penny for turning me onto the Live HTTP Headers Firefox addon), I noticed that the browser was sending a shitload of cookies. Light bulb time. The browser had an authenticated session but curl did not.

After a bit of digging, I found this Twitter account setting: "Protect my updates - Only let people whom I approve follow my updates. If this is checked, you WILL NOT be on the public timeline." Unchecking this box allowed curl to receive a 200 response to subsequent feed requests.

My question to the Twitter people: why not a 403 response? 406 indicates that none of the media types indicated in the request's Accept header are acceptable to the server for use in representing the resource in the response. 406 has nothing to do with access control.

Anyhoo, my tweets should now be showing up in the action streams on the front page.