From my decidedly less business-like LJ:
Twitter is unreliable, even as a service to humans. It’s been all over the internet for the last month or two, as their site has gone down as much as it’s been up recently, due to higher use. In terms of application development using Twitter as a platform, they recently throttled the API limit form 70 to 30 calls an hour, and apparently (I haven’t had a chance to get caught up on it, but am hoping to today), changed a bunch of the API calls themselves.
All of this is fine if one understands that Twitter is a young service built by people with no sense on how to make their offering scale. “Send updates through Twitter” already has different expectations attached to it than “Send updates from your cell phone”…
I’m still really interested in Twitter and developing Twitter apps, but I’m in it from a higher level. I’m not worried about business requirements just yet.
Still, if one wants a quick-and-dirty mobile interface to their application, it still can’t be beat…
The problem with having an API in the first place is having to support the API from then on. And if Rails is really the reason for performance issues, it is an interesting paradox, because I wonder if there would even be an API if Rails hadn’t made it so simple to implement…and then I wonder if the service would be as popular as it is without the many API clients out there.
Update: If you are a real glutton for punishment, or love talk of API’s and/or Twitter, this is an interesting discussion.