Twitter Stream API, Parameter follow has unparseable items

Question

Recently I'm doing a small project on twitter, and I want to get tweets from some specific users.

So I use Streaming API, pycurl and python.

The API Reference says the follow parameter is:

A comma separated list of user IDs, indicating the users to return statuses for in the stream. See the follow parameter documentation for more information.

And I tried this

c.setopt(c.POSTFIELDS, 'follow=slaindev')

but the return message is not the tweets that slaindev posted, but an error

Parameter follow has unparseable items slaindev

So do I misunderstand the meaning of user ID? I think it is the one we use to mention someone( I mean I use @slaindev to mention this guy).

When I try track parameter, it works fine.

Answer 1

Your assumption regarding user_id is incorrect. See this, for example. You are talking about screen_name.