Twitter API Limits…
Monday, March 30th, 2009
One of the lesser known facts about Twitter, from a user’s perspective, is that there is a limit on how many times you can request updates on people’s tweets every hour. The official Twitter documentation states “Clients are allowed 100 requests per 60 sixty minute time period, starting from their first request”. This covers all Twitter clients (phone, desktop, etc.) except for the client on the actual Twitter website.
What does this mean? Well, put quite simply if you are using a Twitter client like Tweetdeck, or Digsby, or Twirl, or an iPhone equivalent, then the total number of requests that these clients make in any one hour cannot exceed 100. If you have a Twitter client on your iPhone or G1 and you are running a desktop client, then think very carefully how often you have update requests set for. If your phone updates every 5 minutes and your desktop app updates every 2 minutes, then that’s a total of 12 + 30 requests an hour, 42 in total (but see Gotchas later). But let’s say that you reset those updates periods to 1 minute on both devices, now you have 60 + 60 requests, or 120 per hour. After the first 100 requests are sent in an hour, Twitter will reply with a message saying you cannot have any more updates until your hour is up. Please note that every action you take on the official Twitter site does not have this limitation. You can tweet away there to your heart’s content.
What does this all mean in reality? Well, it really means that when you first start using Twitter, everything will work great and you’ll never notice a problem. But as you become a power Twitter user you’ll probably download a few clients and really start to follow updates more closely. No doubt you’ll have 2 or 3 clients open and be doing all sorts of things at any one time. This is where you are likely to fall foul of the Twitter api limit.
Other gotchas? Any time that any client makes a request to your Twitter account (think of some Twitter sites that ask for your username and password so they can get information for you) it counts as a request. Keep using these and you will quickly run out of api calls. Similarly on Tweetdeck for example if you ask for the profile of several of your followers, each one of these requests uses one of your 100 calls. Lastly, the most unknown gotcha is that each call for your ‘replies’ and ‘directs’ also uses one of the 100 allowed calls per hour. So, if you can limit how often your client checks for replies and directs in an hour that will really help. Otherwise you may be actually using 3 times the amount of calls to the api than you think. For example, one client checking for updates and replies and directs every two minutes is 30 x 3 requests, or 90 per hour. And that’s without any extras. Hmmm.
So, there you have it, a simple guide to how to abide to Twitters rules. A detailed explanation of the Twitter api can be found here: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation
Have fun tweeps… Follow me on Twitter
Links:
Twitter For Dummies
Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time
Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online
One day hopefully you wake up and you suddenly have 50 friends on Facebook. It’s about this time you also realize that your ‘friends’ are from different pockets of humanity. Some are school-friends, some are work colleagues and some are just casual acquaintances. And that’s okay. Well it’s sort of okay. The problem is that you want to keep up with them in different ways and also perhaps not allow certain of your friends to see certain things (like the weird video you posted from Youtube). That’s where creating lists comes in very handy.
Tweetdeck
Twitpic
Gmail and Twittergadget
Twitter
Tweetgrid
So, there we go, a few ways to use Twitter in the real world. Of course, all I’ve covered here is the PC: it’s also perfectly possible to (and a lot of people actually do) use their phone to send tweets. Each phone has its own client, so I haven’t covered any of them here.
It’s all a question of boundaries and familiarity to a certain extent. Let me explain. If you go to dinner at a restaurant you have never been to before and you are really looking forward to going there, then you tend to pay a lot of attention to the ‘experience‘. If the food is not good enough or the service poor, you will surely complain. If, on the other hand, you’re at home and your partner cooks something that is not up to expectations, you’ll suffer through it and generally not say a word. Why is that?
I was seated next to a couple last night, having dinner and there was a problem with my food. It turned out the kitchen had run out of potatoes and was using ‘instant mashed potatoes‘ instead of real ones on the plates. In the scheme of things I was disappointed, but not angry. It was more that no one bothered to tell me in advance and offer me an alternative. After all, instant mashed potatoes are a little like wallpaper paste, and I really do not enjoy eating them. What I didn’t realize, however, was that the couple sitting next to me had also ordered a meal and they received instant mashed potatoes as well. For them, the substitution of the potatoes appeared more of an issue than for me (on the surface), because they were less frequent visitors to the pub. Their comment was that it might affect when they came back to the pub again to eat. Nothing was done to offer them an alternative. I complained, like I said, and a few minutes later I noticed that all meals that would normally come with mashed potatoes were now coming with fries. But still no apologies to either me or the couple.
