I get hourly emails that show me (graphically) how much justSignal “collects” total from each of the services (Twitter, Blog Search, Backtype, etc). The thing about these graphs is they are amazingly consistent over time – that is why we use them… you can quickly see a change in the normal trend.
Yesterday I noticed that Twitter’s graph looked funny and that the volume was way down from a typical day (on a typical day we collect ~150 thousand tweets). This morning that trend has continued:
A normal day is a nice smooth curve up from about 2 or 3 am through mid day… like this:
Also worth noting, our total volume of Tweets collected yesterday was the lowest it has been in 60 days. Normally I would chalk this up to normal variation, but the percentage change from Monday to Tuesday was 50% – and that is unprecedented day over day change. You should also note that http://search.twitter.com provides an exact tweet for tweet match (in our limited sampling) to what we are collecting via the API – so this appears to be a global Twitter Search issue.
This seems to be affecting Trackers with high volume traffic on Twitter – so many of you will not notice any change. If however, your tracker regularly pulls in 10,000 tweets per day it appears that your volume will be cut (roughly) in half.
Obviously all of this is anecdotal and I’ve received no confirmation from Twitter that there is any issue. We will stay on top of it and keep you updated.
NOTE: No, we are not being rate limited – we are, in fact, using less than 10% of our whitelisted request limit per hour. All requests to Twitter Search API are returning normal response codes and, in most cases, tweets – just not nearly as many as just 2 days ago.