http://friendfeed.com/barackobama

As someone who actively develops using these apis I think the 20k limit is just the beginning of a business model for premium access for developers.

I have been long working on a new version of crowdstatus (a way of creating groups around twitter users) and these rate limits have basically killed the new version.The new version of my app follows lots of users via gnip and it tells me when they are updated then I go and get the data from twitter. As some users post a lot 20k could be used up by just following 2000 users.

People who are saying this limit is nothing do not understand how the api works and how quickly apps need to be able to scale in the twitter world.

It does not affect client apps like tweetdeck etc because these apps are using the users rate count.

just wanted to comment on this paragraph too

The services affected by the new rate limits identify spam and marketing bots and attempt to prune them while autofollowing “real” friends. Unfortunately, these services need to ping the Twitter API thousands of times to determine who is “real”, and according to some developers Twitter is unwilling to improve its APIs to make such verbose approaches unnecessary. It could very well be that Twitter doesn’t want third parties to leverage its platform for services it would like to charge for themselves, but whatever the rationale, the net result is an impasse.

No its not just services like this, I think you will find life streaming and filtering apps like crowdstatus will hit twitter a lot.

These sort of services that figure out if someone is real should not be hitting twitter to much to figure out if someone is a real person and not a bot, 1 they should have their own records that tell em which users are bots and 2, looking at the followers number vs the following number is a good measurement. Also its a type of activity twitter is getting much better at. They are removing these bots from twitter by looking at their activities.

wow that was a long comment that no one will ever read :p

Twitter is in the driver’s seat; that’s my assertion anyway. Check out this analysis of usage patterns of FF and Twitter based on data collected via the API:

http://www.manyniches.com/n00b-notes/friendfeed-helping-twitter/

man…i’ll have whatever it is you’re smoking. Most folks have barely heard of Twitter let alone Friendfeed. There is no way FF is going to achieve mass adoption in its current incarnation–way too complicated. When Robert Scoble, the unofficial FF evangelist, has to write a blog post longer than 500 words w/more than 20 bullet points explaining how to use FF, that doesnt speak well for the user experience.

Now granted, FF’s first yr of growth is greater than Twitter’s was, but that simply means FF was able to leverage Twitter’s user base to gain traction.

Lastly, I hate to say it but your writing reads like turgid prose. Clear, simple sentences are more effective in conveying you thoughts.