Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a small twitter application/service which I haven’t found out there yet. I’m not going to explain it, but suffice to say that it was mighty simple.

The first thing I set to do was my homework: research the API. Oh the excitement! A few different options, with me setting my sights on the REST API. And the excitement continued, they had several different functions for me to get the data I needed in beautiful XML.

And so I tested one of these in my browser, go ahead try it out, put this in your address bar http://twitter.com/statuses/followers/nicdev.xml enter your credentials and bam! There you have my followers (or any other user’s, just substitue “nicdev”).

This is great, let me try it again! Not so fast

/statuses/followers/nicdev.xml Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 100 requests per hour

Well, that sure sucked, but imagine if you have a succeessful service that a lot of people want to use. What happens then? It happens that you can get white-listed. I just applied for it, and will update this post (or write another) when I receive a reply. Yet, it seems that some applications are still hard pressed to survive with this cap in place. In fact, both Cnet and ReadWriteWeb published articles on this subject yesterday.

I certainly hope that Twitter supports the development community around them and allows me to continue executing my idea.

EDIT:

Twitter has sent me a notification granting my request. Expect a post regarding a new application soon!

Tags: api, apps, Development, development projects, services, twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 10:50 am and is filed under APIs, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can speak your mind , or trackback from your own site. Either way, muchas gracias!