Chad Henderson's dashboard

@mdy Yes, but those using clients are likely more skewed to be the power users, and the people that may be putting out there that they're going elsewhere, or using Twitter less, making for a less engaging experience for more passive users, leading to decreased usage by a number of people.

A simple note, whether through their DMs, or via email, saying "If you use a third party client to get your Tweets, then....." No confusion, all smiles. Everybody's happy.

So they've created a twitter status blog (http://status.twitter.com/) and will announce there when the limits will be re-up'd to 70 per hour.

I was extremely frustrated by the lack of communication until mdy's response.

I never knew that the new API call was there, it would be good to see applications now checking this and notifying of changes themselves. As for the notification from twitter about the change. Good point, if 69% of the tweeting going on is not from client apps, thats great news. So this screams the obvious at me. 31% is still a large proportion of the customer base. So, if we know they are there (since we have the stats) and we know who exactly they are, and even the applications they are using (since they are logged - "send via x..") why not send a DM to them? As Chad said, the concept of a communication company putting out a communication should not be a big deal.. I think slashing the update limit in >half to be not only drastic but to do so without communication? Not cool. – Rob, on May 28, 2008 14:03

Seems like twitter could drop informational snippets like this in a users feed.

I think it's just a matter of time before the third-party app developers will make this information available through their respective applications.

Twitter added a new call to the Twitter API for checking the current API limit at the request of the third-party app developers, precisely for this purpose. This new API call was released only a day or two ago so I suspect the apps will be modified soon.

Fwiw, a recent blogpost by RWW shows that 56% of the tweets posted during their study used the web. IM and SMS accounted for 8% and 5% respectively.

These three channels don't require the API and together account for 69% of the tweet traffic.

So while sending an email to all Twitter users to tell them about the reduced API limit may seem like a logical thing to do, I think such an email will only confuse most of the recipients.

A notice on the website won't be effective either, since they're not applicable to web users and won't be seen if the user is accessing Twitter via a third-party application. They'll have hit their limit before they visit to the web to find out what's going on.

So imho, the best way to ensure that a third-party app user sees the revised API limit is to make that info available through the third-party app itself.

communication from a company that produces a communication product.. what a concept

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