Twitter and mobile clients
The most popular way to post to Twitter seems to be via the web as indicated by stats of clients posting updates. Almost all other clients, whether desktop or mobile/PDA generally rely on calls to a Twitter API to pull updates. When clients go haywire, it usually means the Twitter API is having issues and until resolved, you’ll need to post and read updates from the website only.
So, what about other mobile clients? For the iPhone, Twinkle appears to be the client of choice. For Blackberry’s, Twitterberry seams to be the client of choice. For Windows Mobile, there are several good choices available, including TinyTwitter and CETwit.
For mobile clients, you can also access m.twitter.com from your web browser.
Getting errors posting from a mobile client? Check your API usage and make sure you haven’t reached your limit, and also find out when the next API reset will be. Twitter limits you to 100 per hour. You can check your current stats here:
http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml
Use the username and password you log in to Twitter with to access these pages. You’ll see reset time that will appear something like the following:
<reset-time type="datetime">2008-12-07T18:59:43+00:00</reset-time>
You’ll also see remaining hits similar to this format:
<remaining-hits type="integer">92</remaining-hits>
Interpreting the above means I have 92 remaining hits to the API left in the hour, and it will reset at the top of the hour (59:43).
Keep in mind that almost all clients, including Twhirl, Tweetdeck, Twinkle, Twitterberry, CETwit, etc., utilize the API. Watch your mobile usage or you’ll be locked until reset and stuck with the web client.