Hindi Song | Twitter Can Lower Your Hourly Request Quota For System Stability

If you use a desktop based Twitter client, you may have come across the "limit exceeded" error after which the software suspends fetching new updates from Twitter for some time. Ever wondered why ?

Twitter allows you to make 70 requests per hour or roughly one request every minute.

If you have configured MyBlogLog, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. to fetch updates from Twitter, you may be exceeding the limit frequently as these services may be requesting for updates in addition to the Twitter client.

But now there’s another reason why the client is not able to fetch updates (or Tweets) - the Twitter API documentation was updated today with the following statement:

[Added May 27, 2008] From time to time, Twitter may lower the rate limit to preserve system stability.

In that case, neither your Twitter desktop client not those external services are at fault. The only option is then to use your web browser because the API doesn’t count requests made via the Twitter website.