Twitter Streaming API, how to update user timeline

Please forgive this question if its a bit dumb, but I am new to php and slightly lost.

I am trying to 开发者_如何学运维write a little twitter client, where the user's timeline updates come from the Twitter Streaming API (it is not complete but for the sake of design it will do).

The process would be:

User signs up-> I add him to the list of users to track in the Stream -> If I see a message for the user I publish it on his timeline. (The stream listening would happen on the server).

How do I go about doing something like this in php ? It seems a socket server is the way to go (http://www.functionblog.com/?p=67=1), but then people tend to say its a bit of hack....

Thanks a lot

there is a php class that handels all this for you. see, http://code.google.com/p/phirehose/. Hope this helps.