While strolling around I found some bits and pieces which I put together to get a short twitter counter in php.
<?php
ob_start();
$json = file_get_contents("https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/php_trivandrum.json?count=1");
$data = json_decode($json, true);
ob_get_clean();
echo $data[0]['user']['followers_count'];
?>
Nothing more to write now..