refactor to use requests lib

- previously we had used three separate libraries for making requests:
  urllib, urllib2, and httplib. they all had their separate reasons they
  had to be in there, but requests actually does everything we need by
  itself, which i didn't realize when initially writing this
- update the requirements.txt and setup.py files to reflect the
  additional dependency and the official v1.0.0!
Merge branch 'requests'