Twitter API Limits…
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
