Twitter Co-Founder Promotes tweeSP
Shortly after lunch on Friday, Amy launched her Twitter account, only to discover that @twitter had recently tweeted about tweeSP: “Funny: tweesp.com can channel your friend’s Tweets to tell what they want from @Amazon using Tweet Telepathy.” As Amy scanned the @replies, she realized that the tweet, while doing an excellent job of promoting our site to @twitter’s 4,000,000+ followers, had quickly exhausted tweeSP’s hourly API requests.
Patrick responded to @twitter with the following reply: “We’re glad you like tweeSP, but can we ask a favor and possibly get whitelisted? Your recent Tweet exhausted our API requests.” In addition, we set up a Twitter account, @gifts_by_tweeSP, to explain to users why they are receiving error messages in real time.
In under 20 minutes, Twitter responded to our request: “Thanks for requesting to be on Twitter’s API whitelist. We’ve approved your request!” Since then, we’ve feverishly been monitoring both Twitter and tweeSP to gauge peoples reactions, as well as how our site is handling the high traffic. To our surprise, we realized that a number of staff members from Twitter have been tweeting about tweeSP:
“Besides a ping pong table and beer bong, tweesp.com suggested a compelling book to me: amazon.com/Working-People…”, @ev, Evan Williams, Co-founder of Twitter
“yeah, tweesp.com is super cool,” @wm, Ruby, NLP, Stats and General Engineering at Twitter.
Despite the excitement over the reaction to tweeSP,as well as finally being whitelisted by Twitter, Manning realized we had hit another stumbling block: Amazon limits tweeSP hits to 2000 requests per hour. While this may sound like a lot, tweeSP uses anywhere from 5-10 requests per twitter handle searched. Unfortunately, that is severely limiting our access. We are working as fast as we can to fix this problem, and we appreciate your patience. We hope to have it resolved soon!
