Twitter Status Update Limits

[FredRivett]

Hi all,

I’m looking at making a service which one of the key features is being able to sign up to be @mentioned when a specific event happens. So you sign up, when a specific event happens that you asked to be notified for it tweets you this following structure:

@username message url.com

Obviously with the 2400 daily limit for status updates this puts quite a big lid on what we could do. Is there any way around this, or is this sort of personalised @notification on an event in place to stop accounts ‘spamming’ users?

We definitely wouldn’t be spamming users as we’d only do 1 @mention per event they ask to be notified for, but if 2400+ people ask to be notified for an event then we’ve already hit our daily limit.

We thought about creating multiple accounts to get round this but I assume that would be frowned upon?

The biggest thing we’re wary of is people thinking we’re spamming but we’re not as they ask for the notifications.

Appreciate any advice anyone has

[ePirat]

We definitely wouldn’t be spamming users

As you describe the use case, I agree that this is a case where you have issues with rate limits that are hard to circumvent in a reasonable way. Maybe Twitter Staff has an idea what could be done, as this would require some special exception from this limitation but I don’t think that this is possible.
Maybe @andypiper has any idea what to do for your case?

[FredRivett]

Hey @ePirat, thanks for the response! Yeah I totally understand if this isn’t something that’s possible or something Twitter want to promote, but using Twitter for @mention notifications is definitely something I think users of our service would appreciate (and ultimately if they don’t they won’t opt in).

If there are any special circumstances where Twitter would allow this then obviously I’d love to talk about this further as I think this could be a really exciting project.

[FredRivett]

To further clarify, we’d basically be looking to do what @ProductHunt are doing already, but at a larger scale & for a specific event happening on our site rather than on ProductHunt.com

Product Hunt (ProductHunt)

If @andypiper or any others have any insights on this I’ll gratefully hear them

[andypiper]

You can apply for elevated access via our Platform Support forms https://support.twitter.com/forms/platform but this is strictly controlled. In particular, for the reasons you mention (spam etc) the write limits for posting and other actions are limited.

We definitely would not encourage you to have multiple accounts.

What volume of Tweets are you expecting to generate?

[FredRivett]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the response. I totally understand the need for the limit to keep a lid on any potentially negative uses (spam etc) and that multiple accounts wouldn’t be a good way to go.

Early on the volume of tweets would be low, it’s just that if the service grew then we could quite reasonably hit the limits, and due to the tweets being quite central to the service it would mean just as it took off it would die a death.

Basically we want to set up a simplified social network in as much that users have profiles and have items in their profile (normally just the one at a time). Then other users can sign up to be notified when a certain action is performed on that profile item (which only happens once per item when the owner marks it as ‘ready’). A user could sign up to be notified for multiple items from different users. This means that if 2400 people want to be notified when an action happens on an item then we’ll hit our limit for that day (and we’d have to spread the notification out throughout the day). Simply put that’s the issue we’d face.

Appreciate the link to the form there, I’ll fill that out.