By now, you’ve no doubt heard about Twitter. Apparently, a lot of people have since the microblogging site has surpassed Digg.com in terms of traffic. A lot of people, though, don’t use Twitter on Twitter . They use it remotely using the API. But, there are some issues I’ve been running across that heavy users of Twitter might need to pay attention to.

First, What’s an API?

Over the last couple of days, I have been making random “tweets” about this issue. And judging from the replies, some people have no earthly clue what an API is.

An API is an Application Programming Interface. In plain-English, an API is basically a programming gateway that allows outside software to use an application. See, Twitter is an internet-based service. All these third-party applications and websites need to tap into Twitter somehow, right? Yes, and they do it via the API.

Twitter API’s Limits

The fact that Twitter has an API is awesome. It allows some truly powerful add-on apps. For example, I use Tweetdeck as my Twitter client and it uses the API. But, Twitter isn’t exactly care-free about API usage. They place limits on it.

Personal Twitter users are limited to 100 API requests per hour. If you are a vendor who has created a mashup application or web service for Twitter, you can apply to Twitter for an increase.

Recent news, though, is that Twitter is even going to limit these outside services to 20,000 requests per hour. That might seem like a lot for a personal user, but when talking about a public website used by a lot of people, a limit of 20,000 can be pretty limiting.

Even a Personal User Can Tap The API Out

As I have found, a personal user of Twitter (like me) can tap out the 100 requests per hour. Tweetdeck allows you to throttle the usage of your API (see right). By default, the API usage is a lot closer to maximum. However, I have mine throttled to around 34% of total usage.

However, I am STILL tapping out the API. After about a half hour after the reset of the API counter, I have used up my 100 requests and Tweetdeck will just sit there with “Rate Limited Exceeded” showing in the status bar.

What the hell is going on?

Well, realize that any other third-party service which taps into your Twitter client is ALSO using the API. For example, both PCMECH and David Risley dot com tap into my Twitter account in order to download my latest tweets. I was using TweetLater, which I assume counts against my API usage. I was also using TweepleTwak, TwitterFeed, and a few others I probably forgot I ever set up an account with.

All of these different things are tapping into my Twitter account using the API. And given that I have to authorize each API request with my username and password, they count against my 100 requests per hour.

And if I was using a Twitter program on more than one machine, it is double the requests. Many times I have tried to use a Twitter client on my Iphone to send a tweet only to be stopped by the API limit because I had left TweetDeck running back in the office.

I ended up changing my Twitter account password to try to alleviate this. But, even then my API was tapped out after about half an hour. My guess is that one of these things I’m still using isn’t working that well and is overusing the API.

Twitter, Get With The Program, Will Ya?

Twitter sometimes does some really stupid things. They created this thing with no revenue model apparently. This API limit seems like a ripe opportunity for a potential premium option. There are plenty of people who would pay for increased follow count, increased API limits, text messaging updates and a number of other things. Why the hell hasn’t Twitter jumped onto the premium bandwagon?

Couple this with Twitter limiting the vendor access to 20,000 requests per hour. That’s stupid! And it will likely result in many of these great add-on services dying off.

In the meantime, all we can do is pay special attention to how much we use the API and try to meter it. Chances are, only Twitter “power users” are going to experience this problem. For those of you who do, just keep in mind that every single thing which access your account is using the API. You can’t run too many things at once.

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