For traveling up the chain your method is the best. For getting replies to a tweet there is an undocumented API [1] that was implemented with #newtwitter that r

For traveling up the chain your method is the best. For getting replies to a tweet there is an undocumented API [1] that was implemented with #newtwitter that returns some responses. You could also use the third-party API that Twitoaster provides. Twitoaster will generally only work if the user who created tweet that started the conversation is a Twitoaster user. [1] http://app.apigee.com/console/apigee-console-snapshots-1283317200000_5666e140-e2ac-4ccb-a502-bd0aec05cbdb/rendersnapshotview http://app.apigee.com/console/apigee-console-snapshots-12833... [2] http://twitoaster.com/api/ http://twitoaster.com/api/