The Game Must Go On
With all the chatter about API rate limits lately our users have to be wondering how things are going to progress. The answer is, “as usual”, but with a few caveats. Due to the new rate limit limitations imposed by Twitter, for the next little bit we are moving from processing 250 users all simultaneously to give you near instantaneous results, to processing 4,000 users at a time, simultaneously. Our hope is that this decreases the amount of traffic we make on Twitter’s servers, while still ensuring you can receive your nightly stats e-mails.
What this means for you
This means that instead of near instantaneous (up to 3 hours previously, but most were pretty soon after the follow) auto-following and un-following, our measurements are showing anywhere from 6-8 hours between follows. This will affect the following:
- auto-replies — your replies to new followers could be up to 8 hours after they follow you. This should be okay, as your replies will look more genuine and less automated by waiting to send them, we believe.
- nightly e-mails — some of your new followers and unfollowers from the previous day will not appear in the nightly e-mail if we send out the e-mail before the script is run next to read your new followers. In addition, your last Tweet may not be as reliable, as it could be up to 8 hours old. We will work to find ways to remedy this.
- unfollow filters — we suggest you increase your unfollow day limit to at least one more day beyond what it is now. This will ensure with the longer runs that we still unfollow the spammers that unfollow you briefly after following you.
The short plan
Our first priority is to wait and find out what tools Twitter is willing to give us to determine rate limit, whether they are willing to work with us (over the last 2 weeks they haven’t) to reduce the number of requests we have to make to obtain your list of followers, and then adjust accordingly to try and increase the number of people we can process in a short amount of time. If we can do this, we’ll continue to improve features on this front and won’t need the long plan.
The long plan
If we are unable to increase the number of people we can process in a short amount of time, we will still keep the service running, but we will need to come up with other options around the service. Expect to see auto-following around the service FriendFeed soon, as well as stats around that service as well as Facebook and other services.
As always, we will continue to expand the SocialSurvey options, and that will be unaffected by any of this. Expect more features around the surveys, as well as perhaps some new tools we’ll build, taking into consideration Twitter’s new API limits. We are SocialToo, and not just TwitterToo – our goal is to complement the entire social web and not just Twitter! We hope to begin expanding on that soon.
In the meantime, stay tuned here and we’ll keep you updated of new announcements and product updates. Our traffic still continues to surge and users continue to join regardless today, and we hope that continues moving forward. Many experts, books, and blogs are still suggesting others join Twitter and use SocialToo to help manage their followers. We hope to continue to make Twitter an easier place to build a network and establish real-life relationships, regardless of the limits Twitter places on us to do so. We are still accepting advertisers and building our own monetization strategy to ensure we can continue to support you, our users and provide many more features down the road. Our end goal, as always is pleasing you, our users and we aim to do that, regardless of what limitations we are given. With today’s challenges, Twitter has made their pitch – now we must step up to the plate and hit a home run!
Tags: auto follow, follow, plan, rate limits, twitter, unfollow
Glad you guys are doing what you can to keep running. I appreciate your service!
Comment by Brandon Cox — January 22, 2009 @ 2:12 am
twitter needs to figure out long term scaling of their servers and load balance things more effectively. The hiccups they're seeing as a result of amazon's s3's and google-analytics bottlenecking things is crazy. Anyone running firebug in firefox can see where the hangups are when trying to load twitter pages. Hope they work it out. Like your services. Will have more another time.
Michael Murdock, CEO
Comment by docmurdock — January 22, 2009 @ 2:13 am
Thank you for working on this and more importantly thank you for informing your members. Some people like me, would probably be clueless without your explanations. I thank you for taking the time to educate us, and for providing such wonderful support.
Comment by Oh2Escape4aDay — January 22, 2009 @ 12:16 pm
Many thanks for your openness and willingness to discuss this in an open forum. I've always appreciated your honesty in dealing with your 'users' whether it be via Twitter/FriendFeed/SocialToo Blog etc.
It's a shame that some organisations don't listen and learn by your example.
Trying to get a response out of Twitter is like trying to get blood from a stone, unless you have mega-super star status, they appear not to want to listen to mere mortals, even though it's those very people who have made Twitter the success that it is.
Good luck with the changes and thanks once again for keeping us up to date.
Comment by shinerweb — January 22, 2009 @ 7:16 pm
Good to see that you guys are working on it. On the subject of auto-replies:
How about adding a pseudo “random” auto-reply:
1) Have an option called random
2) Have the server determine the right time to send the auto-reply
3) The right time is based on the API rate limit for a specific hour, that way all the hours will be filled more efficiently. You might be able to squeeze out more out of one hour.
I think the there are fluctiations on twitter usage througout the day?
Comment by imranashraf — January 22, 2009 @ 8:32 pm
Imram, that's an interesting idea. I'll keep that in mind for the future.
Comment by jessestay — January 23, 2009 @ 1:28 am
Hi,
There seem to be a few bugs around at the moment.
I am sending a “welcome” auto DM to people – but they are all being sent with a firstname of “Jordi” – I have checked my settings and that shouldn’t be happening.
Also my daily e-mail is showing that people are leaving and joining after a tweet that I didn’t make – I have checked my updates and I haven’t been hacked the tweet is not there.
The “unfollowing” does not seem to be working at all.
Auto following is not picking up all the new followers.
Basically Social Too is really not working for Twitter.
Please tell me what is going on and when these problems will be resolved.
Comment by Nicola — January 23, 2009 @ 10:46 pm
I appreciate your service too !!!
Comment by klinkindonesia — March 12, 2009 @ 11:06 am
great going guys i will support you
Comment by satya reddy — March 18, 2009 @ 3:14 am
Keep doing what your doing guys. Everyone apreciates your work.
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