Use the long ID number in a Tweet URL as script argument

tweet-json.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

import json
import urllib
import sys

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    sys.exit('Usage: %s [Tweet ID #]' % sys.argv[0])

url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/%s.json" % sys.argv[1]
response = urllib.urlopen(url)
jsontxt = response.read()
print json.dumps(json.loads(jsontxt), sort_keys=True, indent=4)