Newbie: REST vs Streaming - which one?

[ondrejsynacek]

I briefly skimmed through API documentation and I’m not sure if I understand everything correctly. I am building an app where I need to periodically get user’s timelines. I guess my app could have a background job and just call Twitter API every minute or so but:

1. I’m not sure this is scalable if lot of users start to use the app
2. I’m not user if I won’t hit limit by doing this.

From what I understand, Streaming API gets you realtime data, I don’t really need this to be real-time, more like every minute or even five minutes.

Thanks

[andypiper]

The rate limits show you how often you can call the timelines endpoints. If each user is authenticated to your app via OAuth, then each of them have their own “pot” of requests so you should not hit limits if you’re doing things on an occasional basis in the background via the REST API.