Pegar timeline do twitter

gistfile1.aw

    <?php    
        function pegatwitter($usuario, $qtd = 10){
	    $curl = curl_init();
        curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
            CURLOPT_URL => 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/' . $usuario . '.json?count=' . $qtd,
            CURLOPT_HEADER => false,
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true)
        );
        $request = curl_exec($curl);
        curl_close($curl);
        $json =  json_decode($request);
        $tweets = array();
        $cont=0;
        foreach ($json as $twitter) {
            $tweets[$cont]['tweet'] = $twitter->text;
            $tweets[$cont]['via'] = $twitter->source;
            $tweets[$cont]['data'] = $twitter->created_at;
            $cont++;
        }
        return $tweets;
	}
?>

o contador não está servindo para nada.