Trying to get twitter plugin to work in mumbles/Jaunty

I already written about my use of the mumbles notifier in Ubuntu Jaunty. Up to now, I really only the Gmail plugin working as I don't use any of the other apps for which there are plugins available.
However, I do use Twitter and was anxious to get the twitter plugin installed and working.
But, even though the install went smoothly, running "python twittercheck.py" consistently produced "20 new messages" irrespective of what I set the Update Interval to.
Having said that just a very few times I saw 19 or even 18 new messages. But letting it run it just went back to 20.
Looking into the Python coding of twittercheck.py shows that the key element in the script is "api.GetFriendsTimeline".
But according to the Twitter API Wiki, this api just produces the "Returns the 20 most recent statuses posted by the authenticating user and that user's friends". So, now ya see where the 20 comes from.
Now the script uses "len(timeline)" where timeline is derived from the api. So according to the above this can never be anything other than 20 which is more or less what I've seen.
I emailed the coder guy and he told me he'd look at it when he got back from vacation.
However, it seems to me to get this to work I need to try to find an api that will actually count the new tweets since the last update.