
Tweetro Slams into Twitter 100K Token Limit - aaronbrethorst
http://www.windowsobserver.com/?p=17250
======
dreadsword
What is going on at Twitter that they would think its in their long-term best
interests to cap API usage, as opposed to, for example, having a paid
offering, a la GMaps?

I understand their drive standardization, pushing their own apps, etc. but at
some point, one starts to think that if walling off their garden is really
their aim, they should just deprecate the API and be done with it already,
rather than the death of 1000 cuts that they're subjecting the ecosystem too.

~~~
michaelt
Sometimes when an organization wants rid of something (semi-) popular they use
a two step process - first change it so it's unpopular, then kill it.

That way you don't have to deal with the PR of killing something popular.

------
Shank
The irony here is that the policy is to direct people to use official clients
for Twitter, of which one exists on Windows 8, aside from the website.

The error is so non-descriptive that users are likely going to blame the app
developer for being unable to use the app, rather than Twitter for having an
arbitrarily defined token limit.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
It'd be less frustrating if they didn't completely neglect their official
clients. And their website isn't exactly perfect, either.

Shame, really, because custom Twitter clients have been great for
experimenting with the API and even UX design, and it being a full on client
means enough people use them to test those experiments.

------
myoffe
It looks like developing an app for the Twitter API is a lose-lose situation.
If your app becomes popular, you are bound to one day hit one of their API
limits or just simply be revoked access altogether.

------
dusing
Twitter promotes a couple companies to buy tweets above the 100k API limit. We
use Datasift for our app and it's fairly cheap and painless. Their API has a
few nice things too like batching.

There are options, it looks like if you are going into building a Twitter
client and you are not charging for the app, you're going to have a bad time.

------
ghshephard
I understand that the twitter 100K Token limit applies on a per application
basis.

What prevents an publisher from releasing their App with multiple
names/incarnations/artwork - each of which would have 100K users.

I.E. Tweetro Pro, Tweetro Advanced, Tweetro Universal, Tweetro Media edition,
etc...

~~~
mochizuki
Theoretically nothing, but who wants to break up their product like that? The
number of different versions would scare away users and they probably wouldn't
reach 100k in the first place. How would they identify versions that have
reached a token limit?

~~~
masklinn
Actually theoretically Twitter will probably revoke all their tokens and their
API key for trying to run around their rules.

------
loudin
If it weren't for the many applications that helped grow Twitter, this service
would not be nearly as successful as it is today. Imposing these arcane limits
is a slap in the face to the developers who made Twitter so popular in the
first place.

This should also serve as a warning to people who build on top of other social
networks. These networks oftentimes can only rely on their own information to
make money, which increases the probability that they will block access to
user data (or at least make it very difficult to access).

------
rjurney
Start charging money for Tweetro. Problem solved.

