Recently active topics in TweetTrak

Sadly, TweetTrak lost its whitelist status that it took weeks to get, and now I have to convince the powers that be at Twitter that TweetTrak is a useful service.

At issue, is their claim that "a handful of users" are receiving thousands of DMs from TweetTrak and until I can limit this to 200 DMs per user, it is off the whitelist.

I was planning on adding statistics to tracked terms to show trends of how popular each term is and to allow people to judge the number of text messages that they are likely to receive. However, it isn't possible to quickly add that, along with a check to ensure that the 200 DM limit per day per user is not exceeded.

The only error that I am aware of is one user (who shall remain nameless) who tracked terms such as "i", "lol", "best", "lost", "bed", "sex", "porn", "school", "obama", and "work", among others. Its quite possible that some users tracking "obama" or "mccain", or "android" also got a lot of messages, but I was informed that I had no limits to the number of messages that I could send.... until today.

So, without warning TweetTrak has been cut off, I don't see finding the time to implement this until the weekend, or even next week. So it seems as if the actions of a few have ruined a good thing for everyone.

I have responded to the request explaining the situation, asking what the concern is about the number of DMs (ie, cost to twitter for sending texts [a legitimate concern] vs. stress on their infrastructure [highly doubt it as my DMs are a drop in the ocean of tweets] vs. they are trying to protect their users [it really is their own fault, but this protection is probably best served by allowing a limit to be set within my twitter settings] ). I also pointed out that those checks to limit the number of DMs per user per day are probably best done within the API itself so that it could apply to all developers that use the API and wouldn't have to be reimplemented many times (each likely introducing its own bugs and complications).

Funny, as I write this i get an email from Twitter telling me that they are growing and looking to hire.

As I'm in contact with Twitter on this, i am not yet posting this to the Twitter API Get Satisfaction page as hopefully they will investigate and respond (in my opinion) properly and I won't need to draw further attention to the matter. Hopefully this was just a heavy handed, knee-jerk reaction.

In the mean time, I'm sorry to have to suspend service, but there is simply no other alternative without collecting more user data (ie, phone numbers or emails for me to send to in place of the DMs), and that would take longer to implement then per user per day rate limiting.

Did Twitter finally give us the boot?

Today, though Tweettrak lost its whitelist status, I am getting all of my tracking texts twice. It might be silly raising this when the future of the whole service is in question, but I thought I should report it.

I don't think TweetTrak is working again. I haven't received any DMs today. Using Twitter Search shows new tweets that I should've received.