I'm using
/statuses/friends/<username>.xml
to find when friends updated so I can do a
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/<friends_username>.xml query on
each. (partly because we don't have passwords for most of our users
and that user_timeline didn't allow paging for a long time)
I'm finding that the latest status on the
/statuses/friends/<username>.xml
page is often out of date or missing.
For example on
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/friendbinder.xml
the entry for "sarahintampa" shows a twitter from 18 hours ago,
despite the fact that she has done 6 updates since then, including one
very shortly afterwards.
and the user "sharemefg" has no status tag even though he has lots on
his page.