One of the biggest reasons why Twitter has gained some much momentum over the past year is the thriving ecosystem of Twitter-related applications. Anything you could possibly imagine doing with Twitter is being created by the development community.
So, it seems downright strange and puzzling why Twitter has decided to impose limits to calls on its API – a move that SocialToo contends “is going go hurt every app out there”.
Rather than being flexible by offering developers more API capacity for a price (which would give Twitter a way to start making money), Twitter is digging in and suggesting 20,000 requests per hour is it.
I’m sure Twitter has its reasons – perhaps the need to defend its infrastructure – but Twitter’s increasing value and utility lies in how the platform is being extended.
That’s the exciting part, particularly given Twitter has shown little interest in pushing the platform itself by adding new features. A good example is Tweepler, which is a cool way to determine who you should be following.
Instead, Twitter rumbles along – a victim, in many ways, of its own success. Rather than push the community away, Twitter needs to engage because it’s going to play a major part in its success – much like the plug-in community has helped WordPress thrive.
By capitalizing the word THOUSAND, Alex scares us into thinking 20,000 requests in a single hour seem like a lot. But I argue as apps grow this is going to hurt every app out there. I’m arguing that 20,000, or any request-rate limit for that matter, limits any app out there from being able to develop on the Twitter platform, and I don’t see why any able-minded entrepreneur would want to build on it if there’s such a rate limit in place. Here’s why:
One Comment
I have to disagree. Twitter is currently has no revenue generation model in place, so placing a restriction on the number of API calls is more than reasonable. In fact, allowing services to fire off 20,000 API calls per hour seems a fair bit more than reasonable in my book. Personally, I don't see why any "able-minded entrepreneur" would want to build an application around Twitter which would need to hit the API more than 20,000 times per hour. If one truly needs that level (or higher) of access to the API, perhaps it is time to look into developing a whole platform around the application, rather than hijacking someone else's bandwidth and delivery system.
Until Twitter is charging for access to either the service or the API, I don't see how we can reasonably set expectations for an advertising-free service we get to use at no cost whatsoever.
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[...] part of the historic inauguration of our 44th President Barack Obama. President Obama has already Is Twitter Shooting Itself in the Foot – twitterrati.com 01/22/2009 One of the biggest reasons why Twitter has gained some much momentum [...]
[...] of how many calls are average, so take a look at Jesse Stay’s thoughts on the SocialToo blog, Mark Evans at Twitterati, or SocialToo advisor Louis Gray (Who very kindly recommended and linked to 140char [...]