twitter Can’t Count

Well here we are in 2009 welcome and I trust your break was as good as mine was, I am going to kick 2009 blog posts off with a rant.

I don’t use twitter “that” much. Although now with the iPhone I am starting to use it more. As many are aware twitter put limits on their API calls which I usually have no problem with. The limits are usually based on calls per hour from clients and services other than the web based service.

Late this morning I was using twitter from the iPhone, made a few tweets and replies and had a look at the timeline and not much else. Then a bit later I booted up the desktop PC to get ready to record 2Schooners with James Williams and fired up twhirl. Made a few tweets, and certainly fewer than the API call rate of about 45 an hour (Vaguely remember something like that). But regardless that I am sure that I had not exceeded the API calls my client “paused” saying that I had and that it would be paused for 5 minutes. This was about 1400hrs this afternoon.

It is now 2030hrs and my twhirl client is still looking like this:

Now I have had this happen in twhirl before, which I initially blamed for the screw up (sorry twhirl). So I tried the iPhone client twittelator Pro that I have started using and got the same thing. Tried twitterific and got the same thing as well. That only leaves one conclusion, twitter can’t count.

So as far as I am concerned twitter is borked and I can not use any client until it gets “unborked”. When that is, I have no idea. Pretty sure that after 6 hours I should not be still paused. I have no idea if this is happening to others but regardless this sucks the big one. twitter while not crashing every 5 minutes is limiting it’s use by being broken. This is not the first time this has heppened but it is the longest.

Get your act together twitter.

Just as I am preparing the screenshots for this post my twhirl client has decided to “unpause” itself, meaning that twitter has decided I have been punished enough. Based on the current API call rate of 50 per hour, over the last 6 hours I have been duped of 300 API calls. As I said twitter can’t count.

About the Author

Dave

Host of The Aussie Geek Podcast and general misfit.

7 Responses to “ twitter Can’t Count ”

  1. No problems with iPhone tweeting from twitterfon, but Twitteriffic wasn’t having a good time today. Switched desktop clients and all has been smooth sailing ever since.

    I think that Twiteriffic has a few issues both on iphone and desktop lately…

  2. Thanks for that Tim. I’d say there are issues, I mean how do you explain a user being locked out of remote (as opposed to web) clients? Especially when I KNOW I did not exceed the API. Something borked big time.

    I am sure it did not happen to everyone at the same time or on other clients, but it was a PITA I can tell ya.

    Where did your Avatar go mate??

  3. Lol I used the wrong email address when posting

  4. I stopped using Twirl a while ago and went back to the web interface… at least that works.

  5. Dave, Twitter can’t even count the bloody characters I feed in. Here’s my moaning about it:

    http://jackyan.vox.com/library/post/proof-that-twitter-cannot-count.html

    I enter straight in the site, keep it under 140, and it claims I go over. Also, I keep my bio under 160, and every day it takes a few characters off. Every day I have to re-enter it.

  6. Seems that twitter is having more trouble than I first thought! I was thinking that it could get a character count right!

Tweetbacks

  1. aussiegeeks (aussiegeeks):

    New blog post: twitter Can’t Count http://tinyurl.com/7okkav

  2. Trackbacks

    Leave a Reply

    You can use these XHTML tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <strong>