Maximum allowed tweets per minute

[dougw]

What is the maximum allowed rate of tweeting. I'm hitting some limit
where tweets are simply not being allowed for a user, and I presume
this is because the rate of tweeting is too high. Does Twitter have a
limit of how often a user is allowed to tweet?

Doug

[dougw]

As a follow up:

1) I assumed that updates to status DO NOT count towards rate limit
tokens. I verified this assumption is correct. This provides weight to
presumption of internal update rate limiting.

2) When this limit is reached, calls to update status return the
user's last status. While I can see where this behavior is helpful in
some cases, is there not a reasonable argument for throwing a 400 in
this case?

[fastest963]

When you hit the rate limit, you should get some sort of HTTP error,
and not a valid return (at least thats what I was lead to believe).

As far as a "tweet" limit, there isn't a limit, but your followers
might get angry and annoyed and unfollow you. I don't know what your
purpose is though.

If your tweets are too similar, they might not be posted again, as we
have brought up before in discussion.

By "tweets are simply not being allowed for a user" what do you mean?
HTTP Error? Sending a Tweet via API and it not being correctly
displayed via the website and/or API?

[dougw]

Yes, hitting API rate limits correctly returns 400 error codes as
documented. I am not speaking about the api rate limit. I am talking
about a limit to rate that status updates are allowed for a single
user. Sending status updates does not count toward a user's rate limit
(as verified by monitoring rate_limit_status while sending updates).

The "tweet limit" I speak of occurs after sending updates with high
enough frequency. When some threshold is reached, new updates sent to
Twitter are not accepted. There is no error returned when this limit
is reached, rather the update_status method simply returns the last
previously successful status update for the user.

Since no error is produced nor is this published in the documentation,
I would simply like to have a maximum target rate so that I can
throttle updates to stay within the limit.

[Alex Payne]

We do cap the number of updates a user can make in a 24 hour period,
whether via the API or any other input method (web, mobile, etc.).
Right now, that number is 1000, but it's subject to change at any
time.

--
Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/al3x

[dougw]

So I'll ensure my application "shapes" a user's tweets and internally
throttles posts to about 40 per hour or 1 every 1.5 mins to stay under
this limit.

Thanks Alex

Cheers.