Apparently Twitter Can Break It’s Own Rules

Posted on June 15, 2009
Filed Under Random Rant, Twitter Stuff | 2 Comments

But it can’t return e-mails in a timely manner.

So, what’s a goin’ on there good ole Twitter support?  I have sent you an e-mail 48 hours ago and have got no response.

I’m frustrated with Twitter’s 100/hour API request limitations.  It’s sucking the life out of my beloved TweetDeck the moment I turn it on! Grr.  Following too many people who update too much? No.  Too many followers? Yeah, right.  TweetDeck is an application that runs on and is in cahoots with your Twitter account.  For me, it is easier to keep up with Twitter this way.  However, the application can only access your Twitter account 100 times per hour.  So every time you refresh the page, or if someone updates, you update, you respond, add a twitpic, add a link, or any other type of action on TweetDeck, it knocks down your 100 count for the hour.  And it dwindles fast, especially if you use it a lot.  Once you hit the limit, you then have to wait until the rest of the hour passes before it resets and you can resume your Twitter activity via TweetDeck.

At first, I thought that it was TweetDeck’s problem and in usual fashion, I tweeted out my aggravations with having to wait out the reset period on TweetDeck.  In under one minute, I got several responses from tweople who told me that it ain’t TweetDeck, it’s Twitter.  The said that I could contact Twitter and request that they increase the API request limit for my account.  Twitter will usually break it’s own limitation rules and give in to your request, assuming that you are not a Twitter spammer.  So I e-mailed them two days ago.  Thanks to all the tweeps who were on it and helped out quickly.

Now if I can just get a timely response out of Twitter.  If they pride themselves on reaching mass numbers of people in mere seconds, then maybe they should work on quicker e-mail customer support responses.  Or maybe I should have kept my e-mail request in under 140 characters.  Grr…limitations.

Comments

2 Responses to “Apparently Twitter Can Break It’s Own Rules”

  1. Aaron on June 16th, 2009 6:46 am

    Interesting that you’re having that problem. I understood that Tweetdeck only refreshes set streams every X minutes. So no matter if you get 5 or 15 tweets, if the update every minute would only use up 60 requests within the hour. (This is all set in your Settings button under the Twitter API tab). I don’t think the 100 limitation has anything to do with the number of incoming tweets.

    Now some other things that could possibly use that limit up? If you click on a username in Tweetdeck and their profile comes up in the application, that’ll use a request up. However a bigger problem is if you have any other twitter clients running for your account. Say for instance if you have something running on your iphone and it’s hitting twitter every minute, and so is tweetdeck. That’s 120 per hour and then you go over your limit.

    The per hour limitation is based per account, not ip address. So anything that you may have logging in and accessing twitter with your account will affect it short of the website itself, or Friendfeed (which uses a different mechanism I believe).

    I hope you find the solution to your problem! I had this issue a while back, and my problem was I was running Tweetdeck and Twhirl both, and that was killing my request limit.

  2. Jessica Hickok on June 16th, 2009 7:55 am

    Thanks @greycloak! I think you probably summed up my problem in the last line of your comment. Thanks for your help!

Leave a Reply