Fetching timeline tweets of 10 public users

[nlprocessor]

Hi Andypiper @andypiper ,
I read the API rules. Is it possible to use 10 apps simultaneously to make 150 requests(15 per app) in a 15min window? The API requests that we make are limited by per app, right? Is my understanding correct or am I missing something? Is there any other limit that I should take into account?

I have created my apps with “App-only authentication”

I’m working on twitter network analysis for a research project. Please help me!

[richardhyland]

I’d imagine that this is highly unlikely.

The rules say you must not circumvent rate limits and this would certainly be doing that

[IgorBrigadir]

Wouldn’t advise registering multiple applications for the same purpose - https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/agreement-and-policy 6.e in there relates to it.

There are efficient ways of making use of the calls available: You have your App Only Authentication, as well as your own Access Token - use both of these to your advantage.

Use alternative / equivalent endpoints to optimise your calls: For example, if crawling friends / followers for network analysis: call https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/friends/list (App + User gives 45 Calls per 15 min) to retrieve 200 per call for accounts with low numbers of friends and use https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/friends/ids to get 5000 friend ids per call for users with more connections. Check friend / follower counts before making these calls with something like users/lookup. This will speed things up significantly.

Using multiple endpoints, caching results, setting appropriate counts & other parameters on endpoints will work much more effectively than trying to circumvent ratelimits.

[nlprocessor]

Thank you for the detailed reply @IgorBrigadir

I did not understand the multiple endpoints part My use case is like the following:

I have a list of 300 twitter usernames whose profiles are public. Now, I would like to retrieve the timeline tweets of all these users. The API allows to fetch only the 200 recent tweets from the timeline. And, I can only make 15 API calls per App in a 15min window. This is why I proposed to use 10 apps, so that I can retrieve timeline tweets of 150 users(from my list of users) in 15 min window. Isn’t this a good approach? Could you please suggest a better solution? I’m using the tweepy library in Python.

Also, I gone thru this: https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/statuses/user_timeline

[andypiper]

This is why I proposed to use 10 apps, so that I can retrieve timeline tweets of 150 users(from my list of users) in 15 min window. Isn’t this a good approach?

No, this is against the Developer Policy, which asks that you do not attempt to circumvent rate limits so that everyone has a fair share of access to the API - don’t use multiple application keys for the same purpose.