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Twitter enforces a limit on the number of direct messages (DMs) that an account can send in a day. As of this writing, our experience shows this limit to be 250 DMs per day. This limit is completely undocumeted, although there are several obscure mentions in Get Satisfaction topics (e.g. What happens if I hit a Twitter limit?).

By the nature of this limit, developers are most likely to encounter it for the first time at the worst possible moment: in the middle of a successful launch of a Twitter-based service. The only way to save developers from this type of disaster is through helpful developer documentation, but Twitter has instead chosen to be secretive about the very existence of this limit.

Developers may apply for whitelisting, which circumvents this limit. This is a perfectly sensible spam prevention measure. The problem is that, due to the absence of documentation, developers don’t know they need to submit a whitelist request until they have run afoul of the limit, and their customers are in an uproar.

To make matters worse, the Twitter API reports successful sending of DMs even after the daily DM sending limit has been reached. So not only are developers hobbled by insufficient information before they run into trouble, but Twitter falsifies the diagnostic information that is provided to them after the fact.

Just think of the number of developer man-hours and customers lost because of this ridiculous lack of documentation. Then think of how long it would take to update the Twitter API documentation with the necessary information.

Please, Twitter. Treat developers as the allies they are. Give them the documentation they need.