how to overcome twitter api rate limit?

Question

I am writing a small app, building stats for twitter users (no of tweets, friends etc). I am using this api

http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?user_id=12345

I can only make 150 calls per hour, which is very very small, given the size of twitter. How do companies that rely on Twitter's API manage to overcome this rate limit?

Answer 1

The 150 API calls is per user per application. Larger companies likely broker deals with Twitter.

Answer 2

You need to get whitelisted to get a far higher rate limit. They are open to all sorts of developers, as long as you give a good reason for what you are developing:

http://twitter.com/help/request_whitelisting