Four and a half years ago we released several Twitter features, one of those being to receive alerts via direct message on Twitter. This has been an awesome feature and we have used it ourselves since day one, to be notified of certain goals happening on our site, such as a new paying customer. Earlier this year we released our uptime monitoring feature, and we added Twitter direct message alerts there also.
So we are sad to say that today, these features have been removed, and it’s unlikely they will ever come back.
Sometime in mid-October, Twitter added some pretty strict throttling. We never saw any “news” about this, but within a few days we started getting tweets and emails about Twitter alerts no longer working. A bit of research led us to this page on Twitter’s web site, which says that all accounts are now limited to sending 250 direct messages per day, whether via the API or not.
We send many many thousands of direct messages a day, hence this feature is now severely broken. We blow through 250 direct messages by 1 AM most days. So unless Twitter revises this limit to something much higher, this feature is permanently dead.
Many other services have probably been affected by this throttle. It just really bothers me how much Twitter keeps slapping third party developers in the face, the very people who helped build Twitter into what it is today. One thing I know, we will never add another Twitter feature to Clicky, ever. Our Twitter analytics feature still works, thankfully. For now, anyways…
