Whitelisted by the Twitter API
This was a very exciting discovery I made yesterday. I was on the Twitter API FAQ looking for exact numbers for the query rate limit when I noticed the following entry:
I keep hitting the rate limit. How do I get more requests per hour?
Just fill out this other handy form! Note that you must have a Twitter account and must be signed in as the account you want the rate limits raised for. Please also note that we only approve developers for the whitelist.
It may take up to 72 hours for us to get back to you, but we try to respond to requests as fast as possible barring holidays and disasters. Once you’re on the whitelist you’ll be able to make up to 20,000 requests per hour. Use them wisely!
That’s weird, I’d spent the whole weekend reading the API and I’d never noticed that. Is it possible they’ve just opened it up to the public? Whereas before we had to jump through a couple more hoops to get whitelisted? Seems likely as they slipped in opening up OAuth beta to the public on Monday without really making a big fuss about it.
Anyways within the hour I received an email from Twitter approving my request, and it was only a few hours later that my username was whitelisted, and now a day later I can see my IP addresses are too. And now I can make 20,000 API calls an hour! Or more even, I’m not sure, as the email response I got actually states “You should find any rate limits no longer apply to authenticated requests”.
And all just in time too. @keithelder (who I wrongly never gave credit for coming up with the domain name – sorry Keith I didn’t think you wanted your good name attached to a bad joke!) tweeted about www.BadTwitterFriends.com and sent a fair number of users its way, which would’ve used up the default 100 queries an hour within minutes and made for a really lame experience. @olivers even blogged about it, thanks dude I’m glad some people know how to take a joke (some people have reacted to the site by questioning its Twitter ethics LOL!). So now the flood gates are open maybe I can really do some damage with this thing, take it from being a bad joke to something that is genuinely useful. Or not.
Jon I’m not sure if they are allowing more calls or not. I was looking for the exact query allocation number as sometimes it’s quoted as 70 per hour but I’m sure I’d seen somewhere as 100 per hour. Then I found the whitelist request form, got my 20k calls per hour, and I don’t care anymore!
I heard they were going to allow more calls with the role out of oAuth, has that happened?
They definitely apply the 20K/hour limit (normally 100/hr) on the whitelisted, authenticated calls. I ran into that with Twitual when I neglected to double-check some return statuses, and ended up with an occassional infinite loop that ate my allocation :)
Hi Richard,
I was researching this whole whitelisting process for my twitter account @storyexperiment and came across your blog. I started this experiment on fb but want to move it to twitter in the next week. Basically the experiment is : add 1 word, sentence (tweet) to the most recent comment and we will make a story 1 line at a time.
SO learning about twitter…i need followers to do this and I think I have to follow them in order to make it work? Otherwise, I am stuck with this question of Can people just shout out the next sentence, or do I have to call on them? I don’t think my account would be available to be whitelisted as it says you must be a developer or have API knowledge. I checked the box that said, if you have no idea what we are talking about whitelisting is not for you =( Hence, I went looking and found you? So what obstacles do you think I will experience with this experiment? How can I prevent them and be proactive? Please help if you can. Thanks. Oh yeah and follow me too! @storyexperiment.
Thanks
Hi, whitelisting is to work with the API and it seems like what you are trying to do is unrelated. I just checked out your blog and I think what you are doing is pretty cool, I only have a 3 month so he’s a too young at the moment and I read him books with big loud images, but I think if he were a little older it would be a lot of fun to have new stories to read him. I think this would work quite well on twitter, and add a new twist as every sentence needs to be 140 characters or less! You probably need to follow and be followed back by the people involved in this, I recommend searching out mother groups and story groups. Good luck!