I was watching TweetDeck rattle off reactions to the end of “Twistory” and the “Dustin of Twistory” when my son came in an asked:
Why is your tweet stream being throttled?
I had missed the message in small print, but sure enough, I was being throttled:
As it had been a bit of an oddly twitterpated day, I also missed the link to click for more information. When I returned to monitor TweetDeck later, I had no warning message. I was, apparently, unthrottled. Certainly it occurred to me that my API TOS incident might have resulted in a throttling of @texifter. However, the Tweets (I still cannot share) keep piling up.
Throttled or not, I decided to dig a little deeper and found out “throttling” is a method of reducing spam, which is defined as repeated posts of the same content. Twitter uses throttling as one technique to reduce the burden on its servers. The take away message? Share less! It is a classic Twitter paradox (a twox upon us).
UPDATE 5/10/11: The next time I found myself “throttled, I found this explanation.
