Live blogging on twitter. A cautionary tale…

Following the apparent success of live blogging at last year’s CETIS conference, #cetis08, I agreed to live blog the recent CETIS EduservMaximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning” meeting, otherwise known as #cevw09. I should really have set up a CoveritLive client as Andy Powell did for cetis08 however I didn’t get round to it so I opted for twitter instead.

Now clearly there are pros and cons to using twitter as a live blogging tool, one of the biggest cons being that you end up spamming all those followers who may not be interested in the particular meeting you’re covering. However the feedback I got on the day was wholly positive so I carried on tweeting, and tweeting, and tweeting until 15.30 when up popped the following message:

“Wow, that’s a lot of Twittering! You have reached your limit of updates for the hour. Try again later.”

Sheila gamely took over the live blogging until 16.00 when sure enough, I was able to post again.

I wasn’t aware that there was a maximum allowable number of tweets per hour, and nor was anyone else I spoke to, but a bit of googling turned up plenty of discussions on twitter limits. I couldn’t find a definitive list of limits at twitter.com but blogger Sugree lists twitter’s limits as follows:

* 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices
* 250 total direct messages per day, on any and devices
* 100 API requests per hour
* Maximum number of follow attempts in a day

I’m surprised I exceeded any of these limits at #cevw09 but not at #cetis08 but I guess I must have done. Next time I’ll either have to use a different application or exercise bit more editorial control!

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