Question

I’m using https://github.com/jnunemaker/twitter to tweet to a users twitter when they post on their blog running on ROR. .e.g

Tweet : “I just posted a blog – ‘I love ruby on rails’ http://link-to-blog.com”

My question is, as I’m making many sites for different people do I have to create a new twitter developer application, with individual consumer keys & secrets, for each blog or is there a way to use the same twitter application?

Thanks,

Alex

Answer 1

You technically can use the same application in a variety of websites. Just use the keys/tokens twitter gives you in all your sites.

Nonetheless, this is a bad practice, since twitter will not be accounting your accesses to the API from the pages that are not the one you specify in the Callback URL. Furthermore, your users will return to that (and only to that) page that you specified in the callback URL, which can be very misleading for those that are in other site.

And finally the most important reasons are the following two:

You’ll get to the request limit quicker than if you had several applications

You’ll get to the user limit quicker than if you had several applications

The limits that twitter manages are not very big so I can tell you that the twitter functionalities won’t work if you get a good peak of visits (happened to me twice). Or they may not work if you’re site receives a lot of visits at a certain time. No matter if your cache your API or not, you’ll end up filling the limit.

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Here is the twitter documentation about this:

Caching. We recommend that you cache API responses in your application or on your site if you expect high-volume usage. For example, don’t try to call the Twitter API on every page load of your hugely popular website. Instead, call our API once a minute and save the response to your local server, displaying your cached version on your site. Refer to the Terms of Service for specific information about caching limitations.

Rate limiting by active user. If your site keeps track of many Twitter users (for example, fetching their current status or statistics about their Twitter usage), please consider only requesting data for users who have recently signed in to your site.
Scale your use of the API with the number of users you have. When using OAuth to authenticate requests with the API, the rate limit applied is specific to that user_token. This means, every user who authorizes your application to act on their behalf, has their own bucket of API requests for you to use.

Request only what you need, and only when you need it. For example, polling the REST API looking for new data is inefficient for both your application, and the Twitter API. Instead consider using one of the Streaming APIs as a signal of when to make REST API requests.

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If you have any question, don’t hesitate to comment below. I had terrible experiences with this when my site got mentioned by a few important twitter accounts