Careful With Twitter

We learned something the hard way during yesterday's baseball marathon -- Twitter has a floating target of maximum posts.

No one seems to know the real answer. Some documentation says 40 in an hour. Some says 100 in an hour. Some 1000 in a day.

What I think it becomes is the obscure reference to "accesses on the Twitter servers."

We have one staffer on the ground in Tallahassee, and we've made the decision to keep him to a Tweet each half inning to keep the NCAA happy (no, no one has said anything to us, we're anticipating that). In between, I would weave in other sports and announcements to keep our end users -- who seem to like a lot of detail -- happy.

At the same time, thanks to some promos and website changes (we added a very prominent Twitter button to go with the rolling ad for the feed and some drop-down menu spots) we started snowballing from 1000 followers on Monday to where we are today at just under 1600.

One of the things I try to do is recognize the hundredth followers (congrats to Jane Doe, our 11ooth follower). To do that, I needed to keep hitting refresh to see the change in numbers, then access the follower list to identify. Here's where I think the limit was probably 100 server accesses to Twitter -- because between myself and Blair Cartwright we didn't write 40 or 100 Tweets in an hour. Combined with my checks on the member list, we may have hit the server more than 100 times.

When that happens, you are dead. Twitter shuts you off for an hour. That's bad news in the middle of a baseball game. Good news, however, if that game has almost six hours of rain delays and you're in the middle of the longest one.

Learn the lesson from us -- during the event, keep the actions with Twitter to the tweets -- hold off any other actions until afterwards.