Use curl to poll the Twitter API directly for a user's follower count.

gistfile1.aw

function getTwitterFollowersCount($screen_name) {
  $url = 'http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name='.$screen_name;
  $session = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
  curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  $response = curl_exec($session);
  curl_close($session);
  $user = json_decode($response);
  return $user->followers_count;
}