This complaint is going to be in regards to Twitterfox, a Twitter integration tool that is a Firefox extension – but it can apply to any of the number of Twitter tools out there.

I installed the tool yesterday and immediately fell in love. My biggest problem with keeping up with Twitter conversations is that I hated visiting the actual site. Once I could integrate it into my Flock browser, all was right with the world. Until this morning. I opened up Flock and the Twitterfox tool did its thing, updating all of the content I missed overnight.

And then, it imploded.

To be fair, the tool itself didn’t necessarily crash or anything. It just stopped allowing me to access it. The icon turned red and there was a little warning message:

No more than 70 updates an hour, huh? I check the Twitterfox development page and see that this limitation is on the Twitter API side, no doubt to lessen the strain on their servers. Completely understandable, from a developers point of view. But from a user’s point of view, it’s disappointing. Not because I generally receive or send 70 updates every hour – far from it. It’s because this essentially means that every morning, Twitterfox will become completely unusable for the first hour I’m online.

How do other tools such as Twitteriffic and Snitter get around this limitation? Or do they? I assume they can’t since the limitation is based on the API itself. But do they force you to “shut down” for an hour every time you start up the software and they receive more than 70 updates from the time you were last online? I can’t imagine that being the case.

If anyone knows what I’m doing wrong, or if there’s something else I should be using, please feel free to let me know.