Perhaps a leaner version for requesting a user's followers and friends
would help? Say, a method that only returns the ID and screen name for
the user's followers or friends, but in lots of a thousand or ten
thousand at a time.

On Jan 21, 12:19 am, Jesse Stay <[email protected]> wrote:
> Alex, you and I have discussed this, but I still think this is a bad
> decision until some sort of better method is placed around getting the list
> of followers of a user.  This basically limits how big any application on
> your platform can get.  Right now it takes 400 requests alone to get Robert
> Scoble's followers.  It takes 350 requests to get Guy Kawasaki's followers.
> It takes similar to get Chris Pirillo's followers.  Does this mean we just
> exclude allowing them on our apps now?  Why develop for the Twitter platform
> any more if we know we can only grow to your limit?
>
> Jesse
>
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Alex Payne <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Up until now we've allowed users and IPs on our whitelist an unlimited
> > 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 ([email protected]) 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

Reply via email to