Why People Are Asking for RT When They Got Limit?

“@someone got #infolimit RT pls if you care. Followers pls help”

OH GOD… They’re not even a celebrity, so why they’re acting so narcist like that? For those who annoyed to them who always RT some people who got limit, or just informing that someone got limit, you got the place, I’m also annoyed to those people.

This especially happen in Indonesia, I dunno for other country but this maybe common on Indonesia. Some of you may often experiencing this before August 31st, 2010, but after Twitter implementing OAuth secure login system and shut down the old one, this problem actually solved and STILL covers normal Tweeting behavior (this also solves the damn fail whale).

So what is it now? A lot of Indonesian tweeps always do this: when got limit, their friend inform it with hashtag #infolimit and the followers helps, then the followers of the follower also help. What the hell is this? Well, some believe that this make the limit passes faster, like this.

You can see example of the Limit Informer tweets like this:

http://twitter.com/infolimitINDO (most tweets translated as “#infoLIMIT @someone is under LIMIT. Pls help RT! Thanks”)

So? Is that true? NO THAT’S EXTREMELY WRONG! According to Twitter’s help page about limit, when you hit limit, you will do nothing except waiting the time elapses. So, there’s no correlation with it make it faster. But, if that’s only for narcisism purposes only, okay, you’re freak and this completely nothing!

But, for those who want to know, why you can get limit?

From Twitter Help Center, article About Twitter Limits (Update, API, DM and Following) as of 6th February, 2011:

The current technical limits for accounts are:

• Direct Messages: 250 per day.
• API Requests*: 150 per hour.
• Updates: 1,000 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.
• Changes to Account Email: 4 per hour.
• Following (daily): Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior. You can find detailed page describing following limits and prohibited behavior on the Follow Limits and Best Practices Page. The technical follow limit is 1,000 per day.
• Following (account-based): Once an account is following 2,000 other users, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. The Follow Limits and Best Practices Page has more information.

*For API requests, it may happen if you’re using (most of you may yes) 3rd party applications.

So, when you got limit, despite there’s an error in API request (but this also actually rare now), just see yourself, are you tweeting wisely in updating statuses? My record of tweeting a day is 85, still not exceeding any limits.