Genesis Blogging

I had an interesting, and informative, exchange this morning with Dewald over at Tweet Later’s help desk. I had put in a feature request asking that Tweet Later add the auto unfollow feature whenever someone unfollows you; similar feature to what SocialToo currently offers.

Dewald explained that Tweet Later would not be offering this feature, due to excessive use of Twitter API and that it would ‘kill my Twitter API rate limit’. When I replied that SocialToo offers this service and that I currently use them just for this purpose, he sent me to this recent blog post by SocialToo on the newly imposed Twitter API rate limit for whitelisted developers of 20,000 per hour.  Apparently, end of last week this new limit went into effect; which explains the recent return of the ‘rate limit exceeded’ notice in my TweetDeck that has been all too frequent in this week, and even the fail whale sightings on Twitter.

What does this mean for Twitter app developers and the favorite apps that we use to enhance our Twitter experience? This quote from the SocialToo blog gives us a clue:

By implementing this limit, it makes it near impossible for SocialToo, or any Twitter-based business for that matter, to grow and build on top of Twitter. Any app that retrieves a user’s followers should be scared out of their minds by this limit, and I would argue the same goes with other aspects of the API.

I agree! This could very well mean the end of the line for many Twitter app businesses. Those that can diversify into other social networks, like Facebook, may survive; but unless this limit is increased, we may be tweeting via the no-frills Twitter web site and that’s it.

SocialToo offered this advice on action we can take for others also concerned about this matter:

I suggest Twitter remove the rate limit and instead work on fixing their API to reduce the need for so many requests to get your friends and followers.  I suggest you, our users, spread the word about this and write to biz@twitter.com and ev@twitter.com stating your concern on this matter.

I certainly hope that Twitter gets itself monetized, and pronto, and can preferably do away with this whole Twitter API issue, or at least raise it significantly to allow Twitter to function well. The very thing that makes Twitter unique and useful is its speed at information delivery – faster than email in almost every instance. If they keep this 20,000 requests per hour API limit; I’m more likely to get information faster via pony express.

Action Call:

• Contact Twitter to voice your concerns and ask them to remove or significantly raise the API limit: biz@twitter.com and ev@twitter.com
• Post your comments below on the this issue: do you use any Twitter apps at all? Have you noticed any failure in those apps this week?