Over the past two days people have been going absolutely crazy about how they are going to “Auto Tweet” without TweetLater. And there really is no simple answer, there is only one solution that i can think off the top of of my head, but there certainly wont be a “TweetLater” replacement.
To make twitter do things automatically such as tweet or add friends, you need to use twitters own API. The API is in simple terms, a programming interface for developers to use. So basically how to use twitter through a programming language. To be fair, im trying to think up ways to explain this to a non developer but it sure isn’t easy. And for that reason, if you are interested, go here to read about twitters API.
But in anycase, twitter has limits on how hard a programmer can thrash around accounts. Just like normal twitterers cannot add more than 1000 friends per day. What the limit numbers are isn’t important, the important thing is that they exist, and if you overrun these limits, then essentially your application will stall. All the limits are based off the IP of the person using the application. In the instance of my twitter friend adder, that is your home IP because it runs on your own machine. In the instance of TweetLater, it is their server IP.
So in essence, TweetLater should live by the exact same rules as us right? Well not exactly. If you believe your application will be well received and you will break those limits, you can ask twitter to basically “whitelist” your IP as it were (This isnt how it is done but is easier to explain it in these terms). This is what TweetLater has done. So it can basically control many accounts all simultaneously without having to worry about these “limits”.
Now, if twitter has whitelisted you because you have an awesome application, and your site suddenly has all these people using it to spam, it will not go down well with the twitter management. This is why you have seen TweetLater remove their upload tweets feature to pay only. I am 99% sure that twitter would have been on their case and quite possibly could have threatened to take them off the whitelist.
I will say this however, that updating tweets does not use up ANY api limit calls. So if you have a website that is purely for uploading tweets, you are fine. However twitter will just ban all accounts using that service. How will they know which users are using it? By the server ip! Not only that but i find it hard to believe that anyone has a public website just for uploading tweets, they would more then likely be interested on building ontop of that onto auto DM’s, Vetting friends etc.
So whats the solution?! The only real way i can think of is if someone codes a script in php, and then each person has to upload it to their own server. Somewhat of a “private” TweetLater. It is really the only way to spread out the auto tweeting accross multiple IP’s. Until something like that comes up, you will be stuck logging into twitter everyday to tweet.
