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!