Every third-party Twitter developer and probably some of their users realize that the microblogging service limits the number of API calls or account actions a user can take, a policy intended to be keep the service up and running as smoothly as possible. Users on the actual Twitter.com site, however, never had to worry about overreaching their limit on API calls.
Now though, users of the new Twitter.com have to deal with those same limitations.
At least one blogger and a bunch of tipsters have experienced short blocks to their accounts, a result of too many API calls.
“I was just tooling around on Twitter curating some Twitter Lists, following new people, etc, and all of a sudden I wasn’t able to do – anything,” writes Chad Catacchio of The Next Web. “Twitter.com completely shut me down with a pop-up message saying ‘Sorry! You’ve hit your hourly usage limit. Try again soon.’”
Like other users who met the same error screen, Catacchio regained access to the site after about ten minutes.
The problem doesn’t seem very widespread and the brief account outages might be worth it to keep the whole site up. With the Twitter.com redesign rolling out to more and more people, however, it would be good of the Twitter team to publicly announce and explain authoritatively exactly what limits users can expect to be placed on their accounts.
According to the Twitter Help Center, these are the current technical limits for accounts:
- Direct Messages: 250 per day.
- API Requests: 150 per hour.
- Updates: 1,000 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.
- Changes to Account Email: 4 per hour.
- Following (daily): 1,000 per day.
- Following (account-based): Once an account is following 2,000 other users, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. The Follow Limits and Best Practices Page has more information.
Most of these rules clearly target spam accounts and bots, but the API request limit particularly aims at limiting personal usage for the sake of keeping the whole site online.
Over the summer, Twitter had to cut in half, from 350 to 175, the maximum number of allowed API requests from third-party clients. Because World Cup fever managed to bring the site down multiple times in June, Twitter often fiddled with limits in the site’s best interest, sometimes dropping the limit to under 100 calls per hour.
Twitter these days does a much better job of keeping its service online, but it seems to have a long way to go. No user enjoys getting shut out of their social network.
image source: http://enews.ntta.org/images/2009-11/Speedometer.JPG
