This is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

While this is my favorite, there are more of these at punditkitchen.com.

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Since most of you probably don’t care why your twitter client (i.e. twhirl, AlertThingy, etc.) isn’t working and just want to know how to fix it, I’ll go through the fix first.

If you’re getting a “limit exceeded” message or if you simply stop receiving Tweets, you need to tell your client to request your Tweets less often.

Changing this setting is pretty easy to do on twhirl. Just click on the wrench icon at the top of the window (directly to the left of the minimize icon), and go to the “Network” tab. Set the “Request usage” option to 30 requests per hour or less. You can then fine tune how often you get Tweets, DMs, and @ replies. I tend to want my Tweets more frequently (every 3 minutes) and replies and DMs less often (every 20 minutes), but you can obviously fine tune this depending on how you use Twitter.

I’m not sure how to do this on other clients (AlertThingy still really baffles me), but you can probably find the setting if you hunt around a bit.

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For those of you who do care about the cause behind this problem:

Twitter recently changed their API to lessen the stress on their system.  If you use Twitter with any regularity, you know they’ve been having a lot of downtime recently.  Basically, the non-IM clients were previously allowed to access your Twitter account 70 times per hour, but the folks at Twitter limited these requests to 30 per hour. Consequently, you have to tell your client to request Tweets less often. Otherwise, about 30 minutes after you first open your client it will stop working for about 30 minutes, and this 30 minutes on/30 minutes off problem will continue until Twitter moves the limit back to 70 requests per hour.

Moreover, my (not personally verified) understanding is that the IM clients (GTalk, AIM, etc.) aren’t working at all right now, as Twitter has disabled the Jabber/XMPP protocol.

Hope this helps!

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If you use Twitter, you know that it’s had significant downtime recently. The Twitter team apparently figured out that the source of at least some of their problems was a Jabber client.  However, they didn’t mention that they lowered their API limits to 30 authenticated requests per hour (down from 70).  They also had some database issues today, so maybe that was why they decided to scale back the service.  I’m happy to trade the frequency if it means more reliability, but I am curious if this is a permanent solution or something they implemented just to get them by in the short term.

Update: I figured I should give you a couple more details.  I figured this out simply by using the API.  After thirty requests, I got the following message “Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 30 requests per hour.”

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My church has a saying (that I’m sure we did not originate), “Pray like it depends on God, and work like it depends on you.”  I think it’s a pretty good saying.  God is in control, and prayer is the most important thing we can do when faced with a difficult situation.  However, God uses His people to do His work, so we have a responsibility not just to pray but to act as well.  In other words, sometimes God uses us to answer our own prayers and the prayers of others.

But when it comes to the recent tragedy in Myanmar, I can’t do anything but pray.  There’s no shortage of disaster relief waiting to go into the country; the government of Myanmar simply won’t let much outside aid into the country.  Some have called for an invasion if necessary in order to bring in desperately needed food and supplies.  I honestly don’t know whether or not I think that’s a good idea.  I can see arguments on both sides and don’t know the country or region well enough to really judge.

So I’m asking you to join me in praying for both the people and the government of Myanmar.  Pray that relief would be let in, pray for a government that respects the lives of its citizens, and pray that somehow through this tragedy, the people of Myanmar would come to know Christ.

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