Ask HN: What is the impact of Twitter's API Limit? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the impact of Twitter's API Limit?

13 pointsmootymoots9 comments

Yesterday Twitter announced a cap on use of their API to 20,000 calls per hr per whitelisted app. This is a low number, and ultimately most of Twitters traffic comes from 3rd party apps.

If you run a twitter API based app, what impact does this have on you? Is the restriction specific to IPs of users of the app, or of the app as a whole?

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From the API docs:

"If authentication credentials are provided, the rate limit status for the authenticating user is returned. Otherwise, the rate limit status for the requester's IP address is returned."

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#ratelimits...

Remember that the 20,000 calls are for GET requests. POST requests don't count towards that number.

So does that mean an authenticated user of an application can have up to 20,000 GET requests per hour?

I think it means that the 20,000 requests is for the user/IP that requested white-listing, rather than all the users of that app. I might be wrong though...

which isn't alot really... if you had 2000 users :)

Very true.

I really wish Twitter had an API more similar to Facebook's FQL system. When I request information from Twitter, there's a lot of excess data that I don't need and don't use, causing unnecessary load on the Twitter servers.

Yeah, this is a problem of their own making. Returning data that ultimately, alot of developers don't need. For example, returning a specific users follower count requires you to GET a huge XML return.... more specific methods required me thinks!

There are a ton of apps out there riding essentially for free on the Twitter infrastructure. This kind of rate limiting is hopefully a step towards Twitter charging money for applications that need to go beyond 20k/hour. While they're at it, it would be nice if they allowed users to buy higher API limits as well. If I forget and leave Tweetdeck running on two machines (home and work) I go through my API limit really quick.

I think it's Twitter's first step to monetization of their API.

20,000 calls per hour = 5 calls per second. Remember this is either per IP address or per username. Is that really a low number?

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