Dustin posted on Twitter…
“Looks like twitter is blocking twitterspy with their new whitelist limits. It’s hard to do fewer than 30 requests per hour per active user.”
I’ve an idea that may be workable for this. Nagios has neat feature that allows different instances to post data back to a Nagios instance in a spoke and hub fashion.
Have many distributed instances of TwitterSpy all ‘sampling’ Twitters data for different sets of users to stay within the 20k rate limit and then post the data back to the hub, all over XMPP of course. Maybe using pub/sub, the hub subscribing to the distributed nodes.
Or maybe I need to cut back on the coffee 
I think it’s going to be a lot less than 20k each. The 20k is for whitelisted services (which I understand to be a global number regardless of actual IP addresses).
I wouldn’t think that building a distributed service would be *really* hard, though. It’s just dumb. Twitter shouldn’t make people have to work so hard to get them business.
Oh that’s not good. Well that’s pushed me to identi.ca as my main micro-blogging service then