RAAK

This Monday, as our city was hit by the awful London Riots, we made an unexpected discovery. Twitter limits the amount you can Tweet.

I was feverishly sending updates about events from my iPhone Twitter app, sharing information on how the riots spread, when up popped the message: Error: Daily Update Limit Reached.

I was shocked. I had never hit this kind of limit before. The only thing I could do was send Direct Messages.

I switched to Hootuite for iPhone. With it, I could still not Retweet. But I could send normal updates.

Then after a bout 30 minutes or so, I could proceed as normal. So what’s going on? It turns out Twitter introduced some limits recently.

Direct Messages: 250 per day.

Updates: 1,000 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.

That might mean that you can send about 82 messages every two hours!

I wonder what a prolific Twitter user like journalist acarvin makes of this?