Alex, Can you please address the issue of how you would recommend that an application be able to fetch the total list of a users followers? I'm hearing all sorts of accusations and bluster, but want to understand from your perspective how you would propose an application do this?
It's obvious there is tremendous value that can be provided to a user, if an application were able to get the list, or changes to the list, quickly and efficiently. I do know that for most users, they are able to use the existing API, and due to the limited number of followers it is fairly painless. However, I can also understand the burden on your servers of requesting the list of followers ... which then also requires that the current status of each follower be included. Even here on the list there are people suggesting that you enhance the API to simply drop the current status ... and only return the list of followers ... which would seem to be a much simpler, and less intensive, query. Can you shed some light so that we can better understand your thinking, and so that we can better understand how to architect our twitter applications for the future? As a side note, we are currently working on three twitter applications ... two that are hosted services, and one that is a desktop application. I want to ensure that we continue to build these fully understanding how to work cooperatively with you! Thanks! Scott On Jan 20, 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
