Business on Twitter

Great post by TK Kirchner over on Blorge regarding Twitter shooting itself in the foot by limiting API requests.

Rather than rehash it, I’m posting the first paragraph here and you can click over to Blorge to read the rest.

Twitter has been trying to stay afloat in the mist of overwhelming traffic for quite some time now. They’ve disabled features, like reply tabs and instant messages, and even tried to reduce authenticated API requests, from unlimited to 70 to 20 and back up to 100. Now, they’re placing a limit on unauthenticated API requests, moving it down to 100 requests per hour per IP address. Developers are already complaining that such move is going to cause serious problems for their businesses and, in effect, cause problems for Twitter.

According to Twitturly, due to recent changes to Twitter’s API, Twitturly is slowly dying. There’s a plea on their status page for Twitturly users to contact the poeple that can help fix this, namely: Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Alex Payne, Evan Weaver.

The graphic below shows how the number of Tweets Twitturly processes in a day has dropped dramatically since the API changes.

For those of you that haven’t heard of Twitturly, here’s their blurb:

Twitt(url)y, or twitturly if you prefer, is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.