Twitter’s battle to keep the microblogging service from falling over is having a drastic affect on third-party Twitter apps.
Users of Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Echofon, Kiwi and even Twitter’s own mobile software have complained of a lack of updates, after the company imposed strict limits on the number of times third-party apps can access the service.
Over the past week, Twitter has reduced the number of API calls from 350 to 175 an hour. At one point last week, that number was temporarily reduced to only 75.
The tight limit means third-party software is unable to refresh Twitter timelines and messages as frequently and can result in periods of inactivity if the apps exceed the API limit during a given hour.
Twitter has suffered several outages in the past few weeks, especially during football World Cup matches when demand has peaked.
Crimping the API is one way to ease demand, but it clearly rankles with the third-party providers who designed their software to update more frequently.
YourHead Software, maker of the Kiwi client, says that Twitter’s new restrictions may mean that “future versions of Kiwi may offer fewer feature features to keep from hitting the limits”.
