In the Twitter "User" object: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/platform-objects/users
The "time_zone" field is using values such as "Pacific Time (US & Canada)". These appear to be Rails time zone identifiers, such as described here: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/TimeZone.html
These are not very useful outside of Rails, and have to be translated to their full IANA time zone identifier, such as "America/Los_Angeles" in order to be useful in the vast majority of other platforms and languages.
The Rails MAPPING constant defines the dictionary for translation. I humbly request that in the next version of your API that you expose the translated value, rather than the Rails proprietary identifier.
Updates
- This unfortunately cannot be addressed until a future API version.