Being a 3rd party developer for Twitter at the moment is a very difficult and frustrating one. As Louis Gray reports in more detail Twitter are introducing a rate limit for unauthenticated API requests. Below is the announcement from Twitter, not on the blog but on a Google Groups message board.
As we hope you’ve noticed, the site has been feeling much snappier for both web and API requests over the past several days, even despite the increased rate limit. In our continued effort to keep things fast and prevent abuse we’re planning on introducing rate-limiting by IP for unauthenticated API requests. We’ll allow 100 unauthenticated requests per IP per hour, just as we currently do with authenticated requests. Please let us know if you foresee any ghastly issues with this change. It won’t go into production until early next week at the soonest.
Today popurl’s deactivated the twitter section, due to the rate restrictions and more services are going to be hit by this, whilst some sites and services still in development have to juggle around to cope with the new restrictions.
What added fuel to the fire was that Twitter appeared to flip the switch without telling anyone which caused a bit of confusion, below are some of the conversations taken from the Google Groups
Sorry, I shouldn’t have been so presumptive. I would have liked to at least seen a “hey, we turned it on” post here, yeah.
Twitter’s reply
Sorry, I’ve been a bit out-of-sync with our deployment schedule, so I wasn’t sure it was going out late yesterday, PDT. My apologies - we’ll be sure to send notice of future changes, although this is in keeping with the “next week” timeline that I mentioned last week.
Which is understandably creating all kinds of mixed views and opinions from developers
Yes, and the silence from Twitter staff regarding this is worrying to say the least. Alex and Evan are always there helping with all sorts of questions, but this time, it seems, they got orders from above. And that means this is a business decision, not a technical one. And it all started roughly around the time Twitter acquired Summize. Every app that remotely does something similar is doomed. That means search, datamining, trends analysis, following conversations, whatever. The whole ecosystem that formed around stuff that Twitter didn’t do itself has been considered dangerous competition. So, fellas, we’re pretty much screwed.
Twitturly, a great service that has a lot of followers were told that they would be white listed, which means that they would hopefully avoid the new limits and would carry on without change, however they are still chasing this, as the site hangs in limbo
We have been trying all day to get someone at Twitter to re-enable us. This morning @biz said that Twitter white-listed us, but it didn’t seem to work. I let them know shortly after he posted it that we were still getting blocked but no one has responded, despite dozens of tweets from myself and our users asking them to re-enable us. Twitturly is pretty much dead now and many other apps either already are too, or they are going there very quickly.
When you read through the conversations you can really see the frustration from the developers, who have put a lot of time effort and money into their projects only for Twitter to come along, flip a switch and make their sites dead in the water. With the recent purchase of Summize are they slowly trying to build walls around the data or are they just struggling to keep the site up and are trying to limit the API load?, one things for sure is that Twitter has a lot of frustrated developers with little information as where to go next.
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