Authentication for new Twitter API 1.1

Question

I have an application that needs to display number of followers and following (users/show.json) for a random user on a public page (authentication is not requir

Answer 1

The easiest way to do what you're asking is to use Twitter API 1.1's 'application-only authentication' feature, which works for much of the API. See Application-only authentication. You can see a Python example of it in get_bearer_token.py.

Once you have a bearer token, you only need to include that in your request authorization header - signing is not necessary.