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On Facebook, you are identified by a number like 7435423976 that will never change, even after changing your name or your URL shortcut.
Does Twitter have the same never-changing identifier?
Twitter users have a name (for instance "JohnDoe4ever"), but they can change it, so it is not a good identifier. Is there a hidden, better one?
Yes, each Twitter Account is assigned a user_id.
Taken from the Twitter API Documentation
user_id
The ID of the user for whom to return results for. Helpful for disambiguating when a valid user ID is also a valid screen name.
It's also useful to know that you can get the user_id by displaying a users tweet via the /statuses/show/{tweetId} API Call
This will display results similar to this:
As you can see the user_id is provided along with the individual tweet information.
The {tweetId} can be found by clicking on the time stamp of any tweet. The {tweetId} will be long number at the end of the URL.
