Twitter, what are YOU doing?

Written on July 18, 2008 – 4:08 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor

That the Twitter service is choking up every now and then is nothing new. The Twitter team had made numerous attempts to improve the continuity of the service, as they reduced features such as the reply tab, capping pagination and blocking instant messaging from time to time. It seems that all these efforts have not reduced their down-time at all.

Louis Gray mentions that the list of reduced features can be extended once again, as Twitter is tweaking their authenticated API hits again. It seems that Twitter capped API requests down to 100 hits per hour, unannounced. This causes a lot of frustration by many users, but especially with the people behind the many applications that are making use and rely on Twitter for their data. If I was working my ass off to create something valuable for the Twitter community, only to find that Twitter keeps limiting the access to their service, I would be very demotivated to continue Twitter development. It makes me wonder if Twitter realizes the viral effect that third party applications can have.

In other Twitter news, it seems that the homepage showed some new changes to their design for a short while this morning, with the biggest change being that the Twitter tabs have moved to the right of the screen.

It seems that Twitter prioritized their functionality and design over the API and reliability for now. As they made another drastic change on the backend to avoid their service choking up and a sudden change in their layout earlier this morning. Sure, integrating search is a great idea, but many question the priorities that the short message service is taking recently. Or maybe we have to wait until someone takes the job as Operations engineer on their job site to enjoy 24-hour Twitter bliss in our lives.

I hope you like that post!

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About the author: Joop is an entrepreneur and blogger located in Seoul, South Korea. Read his blog here.

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5 comments/trackbacks to “Twitter, what are YOU doing?”

Jul 20, 2008: In My RSS Reader This Week - 8th Edition | General Marketing Blog
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By Sarah on Jul 18, 2008

Well, it’s good that they will change it, atm it’s not at all logical, The replies are with the recent, archive and everyone, but the DM’s are on the right…

Anyway, this should not be a priority.
The “older” should always be there, the “replies” should always work, and I want the “with_friends” back (how long is it gone now?).
This morning I had a update from someone I’m NOT following.
Some downtime now and then is annoying but I can live with it, as long as they give us all the services. But no.. instead of working on that, they are redesigning it…

Twitter, Whàt are YOU doing?!!

[Reply]
By David on Jul 18, 2008

Twitter’s got some issues, most definately. Yet its still a great tool we all love to use and track others. The upgrades are outlined in my post at http://davidhelbig.com/new-twitter-design/

[Reply]
By Jelle on Jul 18, 2008

Just a little to early: Twitter goes XMPP with Gnip

“What does this mean for the average Twitter user? It means that more third party services will start to work better. Today, other than a handful of services like Summize (which was just acquired by Twitter) and Friendfeed, third party apps must talk to Twitter via their normal APIs. Those APIs require applications to send Twitter a request and then get a response. The two way communication creates a big load on Twitter in the aggregate.

With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use.”
Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....d-to-gnip/

[Reply]
By Gerard van Enk on Jul 27, 2008

“It seems that Twitter capped API requests down to 100 hits per hour, unannounced.”

A long time it was capped down to 30 requests/hour and now it is up(!!) to 100 requests/hour, that’s good news for developers.

[Reply]

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