Is Twitter’s API Blue Sky Falling? um NO!
January 21st, 2009 by Jerell | Filed under Support, Twitter.I am amazed at how much attention Twitter’s new policy changes have received today. From the sound of it, the blue sky is falling and all of our beloved Twitter applications will not longer be working in a few days.
But this doesn’t seem to be the case. When you go over to the actual Twitter Development Talk, you see the following posted (with my emphasis in BOLD)
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number of requests per hour. When our whitelist was in the tens and
low hundreds, this made sense. Now that we have more developers on the
whitelist than we can reasonably maintain close communication with, we
need to put a ceiling on the number of requests per hour whitelisted
accounts and IPs can make.
Starting later this week we’ll be limiting those on the whitelist to
20,000 requests per hour. Yes, you read that right: twenty THOUSAND
requests per hour. According to our logs, this accounts for all but
the very largest consumers of our API. This is essentially a
preventative measure to ensure that no one API client, even a
whitelisted account or IP, can consume an inordinate amount of our
resoures.
If you run one of the services that routinely exceed 20k
requests/hour, please get in contact with us (a…@twitter.com) as soon
as possible. Chances are good that you’ll simply need to slow your
crawl rates, implement more caching on your end, and limit requests to
only active accounts. We’re happy to work with you to find solutions.
–
Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/al3x
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and as @al3x just said on his Tweet
and I wanted to double check…
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People are asking Alex. He’s not answering. Did you see my question in that thread? No answer from Alex. The fact is, with the way their follower/friend API is set up, there is no good way to implement caching or cut down requests and still provide a good service to users after you get big enough. (and I argue we’re not even near as big as we could be!) There’s an issue, I’ve contacted Alex personally about this (as I stated in the blog post), and he still refuses to address the issue. I wish Alex would answer questions and stop these PR shenanigans. I don’t see him commenting to respond on any of these blogs that are writing about the issue - I’d be happy to discuss it with him there, or on the developers list. Where is Ev and Biz in all of this?
You raise valuable concerns. Will it probably cause some degree of stress on high users, you bet, and I agree with you.
However my point is that they are not saying anywhere that they are ending this service. Just changing it. To me it seems that many folks are getting caught up in some interpretation that 20K is now the magical end all number when it is not.