Do I need to consider user context when working with Twitter API here?

Question

I'm building a small system which allows a user to login to the system, put a query and retrieve tweets 'relevant' to the query. I also want to get user's past tweets, his followee/er ids and his profile information.

So this twitter api page says,

In order to make authorized calls to Twitter’s APIs, your application must first obtain an OAuth access token on behalf of a Twitter user or you could issue Application-only authenticated requests when user context is not required

So in my app, if I am going to have a Sign in with Twitter button, means I am going with the user context based authentication. But I was just wondering do I really have to do it this way..? as to get the information that I want (user's past tweets, his followee/er ids and his profile information) it's enough to get the user's ID so then I can get what I want via the twitter API through Application-only based authentication.

From my understanding, if I'm not going to update the user's profile, post tweets for the user or access user's direct messages, I guess I can do this without having the user to signin to his account but by just making the user to enter his user ID, right? Am I missing anything with this approach?

Answer 1

That's correct, you don't need the user to authenticate in order to get her profile, previous tweets, run a search, etc.

Really, the only things you can't do are post tweets, change profile information, send or read DMs.

It's important to note that your app will have to abide by the Twitter Rate Limits - if your app is only used by a few people, it should be fine. If the app gets popular, you will need to implement sign in so that each user has their own limits.