Twitter API: count followers, count total retweet, and retrieve RSS feed of someone's twitter page

Question

I am new to Twitter API and only know that we can pull someone's Twitter feed from Twitter through RSS feed on that person's Twitter page/ profile.

But, how can I pull more information of that person's Twitter page? For instance,

1. His/ Her followers.
2. Total of his/ her retweet items.

http://www.qapture.net/

There are a couple of interesting things I still cannot figure them out how they did this website,

1. If you compare the particular person's twitter feed on this website with that person's twitter page, some of the items are pull in qapture website, but some are not, so I think they must have select certain items of feed only - how do they do that??

2. If you mouse over an item of feed on qapture website, you can see other information of that feed item, such as '9 hours ago', '6 tweet(s)', etc - how do you get that information from?

Which area of Twitter API that I should look into to achieve these...?

I'm using PHP and Jquery for my web development by the way...

Many thanks!

Lau

Answer 1

Take a look at the actual Twitter API, not just RSS feeds:

http://dev.twitter.com/