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 LouisGray.com, the decision was announced on Twitter’s Google Group forum on July 10^th and put into effect last Wednesday at around 5pm Pacific Time. Alex Payne of Twitter said the following in the post.

In our continued effort to keep things fast and prevent abuse we’re planning on introducing rate-limiting by IP for unauthenticated API requests… Please let us know if you foresee any ghastly issues with this change.

Soon after the announcement was made, developers began expressing their “ghastly issues.” Kee Hinckley, CEO of Somewhere, Inc., Richard Cunningham of FriendBinder, and Joel Strellner of Twitterurly, all of which provide services that depend on its API, complained on the Google Group forum.

Sometimes these programs may make multiple unauthenticated requests, depending on its function and how often the information needs to be updated. In addition, this problem can get worse for people that use multiple services that require Twitter’s API, since these limits are shared across websites. Plus, these limits may be reached even more quickly for those customers that use transparent web proxies with their internet service providers.

This is becoming a serious problem for staff as well as a huge stumbling block for developers. Hinckley of Somewhere, Inc. had this to say.

Previously getting that info was a "free" call. You’re making it have a cost. So now we need to figure out how to juggle those calls and spread them out so we don’t exceed the limit. It’s a nice barrier-to-entry for other developers, but frankly, I’d rather work on features.

Twitt(url)y, a service that tracks URls posted in people’s tweets, is also experiencing major problems. Ever since the decision came into effect on Wednesday, the amount of Tweets they became behind in spiked.

On their status page, they said that anything 2,000 tweets or below is usually 15-30 seconds behind real-time. As of 9pm yesterday, they were over 177,000 tweets behind. You do the math.

This may turn out to be the final gash in the hull that sinks the Twitter ship. It depends so heavily on its API to deliver its traffic that without it Twitter may slowly die. Jessy Stay of StayNAlive.com believes “when the developers bail, so will the users.”

Imagine, for instance, if Seesmic were to stop development on Twhirl due to the costs associated with keeping up with API flaws? That would be quite a chunk of Twitter’s users being forced over to the other Twhirl clients. FriendFeed and Seesmic itself – it’s such an easy transition were Twitter support to be dropped!

Several suggestions were posted on the Google Group’s forum. Hinkley of Somewhere Inc suggested limiting 100 authenticated or unauthenticated calls per user account. Rob Iies of RMI Development thought that whitelisting legitimate IPs would be a good idea.

In any case, it’s clear that this move to regulate Twitter traffic is not in the company’s best interest. Limiting the API, its best asset and biggest growth potential, isn’t the best idea, unless they’re trying to shoot themselves in the foot and get developers over to FriendFeed.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 1:42 am under Web2.0.

Read more entries by TJ Kirchner.
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