The entire Twitter system is built to be very fast — in fact it is literally real-time messaging in many cases. This “speed of delivery” can be very attractive to the proverbial spammer crowd, so I appreciate that Twitter has built in some limits that encourage the social messaging nature of Twitter while discouraging the abusive spammer elements.
In a nutshell, Twitter likes to see that people are not only following a large number of people, but they also like to see that you are participating on Twitter to the degree that you are also attracting a comparable number of followers. This “balancing” seems like a very good system to insure that Twitter participants are contributing meaningful activity as well as viewing the activity of others.
I found it helpful to read posting on the Twitter forum that explains Twitter’s Follow Limits in a bit more detail. A quick summary of the Twitter limits follows:
1,000 updates per day
1,000 direct messages per day
100 API requests per hour
Follows limited after 2,000 (balancing begins to apply)
1,000 direct messages per day
100 API requests per hour
Follows limited after 2,000 (balancing begins to apply)
What are your thoughts on these Twitter limits? good? bad? And why? Are there other Twitter policies that you feel others should be aware of?
