We never had hard limits on our API, but because of some excessive use of our Search API lately, we are forced to implement rate limiting. We will however not limit the upload call and will play nice with the rate limit.

Currently we will limit calls to our Search API to 5 calls per 10 seconds. That’s still 1800 calls per hour. Our current 1.0 and new 2.0 API’s are not yet limited, but will be in the future. The same limits will probably apply.

Please note that:

You should implement caching on your end when you use our API and expect a lot of traffic. We receive a lot of uncached queries to, for example, getThumb and SearchPosts, which could easily be cached.

Our API is not built for large scale javascript implementations. You should always proxy calls through your own server, to prevent massive duplicate queries.

Due to the current downtime and high error rates on Twitter, Twitter has decided to postpone the shutdown of the Basic Authentication by a month and a half. Raffi Krikorian (@raffi) states on the Google group:

we want to make sure that you all have calm waters to test your new codebases where you’re not dealing with whales, robots, and whatnot. with the world cup ending on july 11th, you will all have over a month’s time of calm waters and site stability to finish the switch over.  also, with the vast majority of media providers already switched over to OAuth Echo, you now also have an additional month of time to work out your integrations with them.

This also means that it will be possible to authenticate against Mobypicture’s API with Twitter usernames and passwords until August. We will remind every developer by mail to switch when basic authentication is being used after August 1st. Take a deep breath, you have a full 8 weeks to make your switch.

Alternatives to Basic Auth

Twitter has provided several alternatives to Basic Auth. Oauth being the most important. OAuth Echo is a way to delegate one time access to a Media Provider like Mobypicture. Currently Twitter (and thus Mobypicture) only supports the Upload scenario, where you upload the media to Mobypicture, but send the tweet yourself. The UploadAndPost scenario is still in active development.

OAuth Echo is supported on our current 1.0 API and the new 2.0 API.

Behind the scenes we’re working hard at a completely new version of Mobypicture. Not only the site gets a revamp, we also renew our API’s and developer center.

New API

Our current API is online since the beginning of Mobypicture and is missing some new features. API 2.0 makes a fresh start. Not only will it incorporate features like OAuth 2.0, OAuth Echo and a streaming API, the upload functions will be compatible with other Media Providers like twitpic and yfrog to make it even easier to develop applications for Mobypicture. Read the rest of this entry »

June 30th is closing in fast, the date that Twitter will cut of it’s basic authentication and completes it’s move to OAuth. It will no longer be possible to login with a Twitter username/password into the API. OAuth will be the only way to authenticate your users. For non-web applications Twitter has released XAuth, a way to convert a username/password combination to OAuth tokens. All other apps are forced to switch to OAuth.

Because of this move, it will no longer be possible to authenticate users to the Mobypicture API by providing a Twitter username/password combo. Luckily Twitter’s head of platform Raffi Krikorian has thought of a way to provide delegated authentication, called OAuth Echo. Read the rest of this entry »