Yesterday Twitter announced a cap on use of their API to 20,000 calls per hr per whitelisted app. This is a low number, and ultimately most of Twitters traffic comes from 3rd party apps.<p>If you run a twitter API based app, what impact does this have on you? Is the restriction specific to IPs of users of the app, or of the app as a whole?
From the API docs:<p>"If authentication credentials are provided, the rate limit status for the authenticating user is returned. Otherwise, the rate limit status for the requester's IP address is returned."<p><a href="http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#ratelimitstatus" rel="nofollow">http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#ratelimits...</a><p>Remember that the 20,000 calls are for GET requests. POST requests don't count towards that number.
There are a ton of apps out there riding essentially for free on the Twitter infrastructure. This kind of rate limiting is hopefully a step towards Twitter charging money for applications that need to go beyond 20k/hour. While they're at it, it would be nice if they allowed users to buy higher API limits as well. If I forget and leave Tweetdeck running on two machines (home and work) I go through my API limit really quick.