May

24

Rough Week for BeTwittered And Twitter

Filed Under twitter 

First off, I want to apologize for the blank gadgets, slow responses, and general bad week.  Sorry! I moved BeTwittered to a faster server just in time for Twitter to start having it’s own bad week of daily outages. I’ve been busy tuning the new server and BeTwittered in my free time hoping to alleviate some of the problems caused by the twitter outages and slowness (blank gadget screens, for example) My apologies for the poor error handling. I’ll be working on that over the next few days. I’ve added a couple new feature requests to my list of “hopefuls” including timezones, resizing, etc. Happy twittering! Robert

Comments

11 Responses to “Rough Week for BeTwittered And Twitter”

  1. Joel York on May 30th, 2008 8:37 pm

    Hi Robert,

    I am Joel York, VP Marketing at Conduit.
    I just thought I should check in with you
    regarding your betwittered gadget and give
    you an important heads up.

    We are about to launch the official
    TechCrunch toolbar (CrunchBar) on the TechCrunch site…and your gadget is on
    the toolbar.

    You can view it at..
    http://www.techcrunch.com/toolbar/
    and try it out by installing the toolbar

    We are using the basic php script at
    http://www.32hours.com/betwittered/index.php
    not the iGoogle gadget.

    Please let me know if you have any concerns
    or questions. (or if we are into any technical trouble by not using igoogle…
    can’t be easily put on the toolbar)

    Regards,

    Joel York
    VP Marketing
    Conduit
    (415) 297-9681
    joel@conduit.com
    blog: http://chaotic-flow.com

  2. Joel York on May 30th, 2008 8:46 pm

    actually…
    http://www.32hours.com/twittergadget/

    Please let us know if you are not supporting this script version of the gadget any more.
    And/or if you have any concerns.

    Thx,

    Joel York

  3. Robert on May 30th, 2008 9:23 pm

    Hi Joel,

    That’s great news! I’ll contact you with some questions I have, and some suggestions that might help us work better together. I’ve had a quick look at the toolbar (nice job!) and have had a couple of thoughts already. I’ve moved to a new server from 32hours, and would like to make sure that CrunchBar gets it’s own code-base since we’re planning some changes and feature adds to the location you’ve pointed out.

    Thanks very much for the heads-up!
    Robert

  4. Princess Ivory on May 31st, 2008 8:48 pm

    Your product is trying to refresh too frequently. Here is the error message I keep getting:

    OOPS! Something went wrong…
    400: Invalid request. You may have exceeded your rate limit of 70 timeline refreshes per hour. Don’t worry, you don’t have to wait an hour to get back in. Just sit tight for 5-10 minutes. Crack your knuckles for a while. Then ease up a bit on the refreshes!

    BeTwittered will check back in every few minutes.

  5. Olly Newport on June 1st, 2008 4:27 am

    @Princess Ivory

    The new Twitter API key has been lowered from 70 updates per hour to 30, meaning that the more the BeTwittered gadget refreshes the more API timeline uses to Twitter this takes up.

  6. Robert on June 1st, 2008 6:30 am

    @Olly Newport and @Princess Ivory
    Thanks for taking the time to leave posts for us. It helps Scott and me keep up with what’s going on with everyone, and gives everyone else a chance to share info.

    It’s true, the rate limit was lowered quite a bit as the Twitter crew is trying to deal with their recent problems. I have already temporarily dropped refreshes in BeTwittered to every 4 minutes. That alone should not hit the rate limit Twitter has in place, but if you use the refresh link, or refresh/reopen the iGoogle page, that counts too. Also, if you have any other Twitter clients, they add to your refresh count. The count is kept by user, not by client, so this will be a problem for some people too.
    Robert

  7. Princess Ivory on June 1st, 2008 7:07 am

    “or refresh/reopen the iGoogle page, that counts too.”

    Oh my, this will be a real problem. I use my IGooge page as my hompage desktop, and click from it to all the other things on it: reader, email, bookmarks, etc.

    Any chance this can NOT be an issue? If this is truly the case, then I will not be able to use your product. I need something on my Ipage that will not cause any functions to time-out or go over preset limits.

    Princess Ivory
    (thanks for responding to my last post so quickly and thoroughly)

  8. Robert on June 1st, 2008 7:19 am

    @Princess Ivory,

    Thanks for the input. I won’t be able to make the change right away, but I can add an option to turn off auto-refreshes. Thanks for the idea! :^) I’m assuming, too, that Twitter will turn their limit back up to 70 refreshes per hour when they figure out how to handle their customer load. That alone, should be enough fix the problem for most everyone. Hopefully they are quick!

    Thanks again!

  9. Princess Ivory on June 3rd, 2008 9:28 am

    Update: Today, Tuesday 6/3/08, my BeTwittered continues to be blank on my Google iPage. Anyone else still having this problem? I’ve had to resort to using the Twitter.com page instead.

    Princess Ivory

  10. Princess Ivory on June 3rd, 2008 9:29 am

    And I no sooner post that, then content loads!

    Go figure! It is sporadic access, however.

    Princess Ivory

  11. HeyChinaski.com » Blog Archive » Is Michael Arrington Lying To Us? on June 21st, 2008 5:44 pm

    [...] quick Google search turned up this post on 32Hours, the blog of the creators of BeTwittered.  The first comment is from someone [...]

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