Twitter API Limit

Question

I have heard that Twitter limits the number of API calls a third party app can make per hour. I believe the limit is around 100. My question is, does that limit apply per user, or is it 100 calls per app? 100 for the entire application seems very low, but I wanted to make sure and I couldn't find my answer in the documentation I was reading. Thanks.

Answer 1

The limit as of Oct. 8, 2009 is 150 requests per hour per ip/account. Sending tweets doesn't go against that limit.

However, you can get your ip(s) and account whitelisted, which gets you up to 20,000 requests per hour per ip/account. To do that, go to: http://twitter.com/help/request_whitelisting

Note: You MUST be in production to be whitelisted.

For those of us in beta (myself included) all is not lost as Twitter has an API to check how many requests/hour you have left for that ip/account (the api is called rate_limit_status).

(Sorry, I'd post more link but Stackoverflow won't let me...)