From the article:

"And yes, I’m aware that using a pre-existing library to interface with the Twitter API might be considered “cheating”, but it would be downright impossible to fit the script into the size constraints without it. The API endpoint URLs alone would probably be long enough to push the script over the limit."

Edit: Before this turns into a gauntlet[1], I'm simply quoting the article so that people don't think the author is oblivious to this fact.

[1] http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?o2=&o0=1&...