Twitter Rate limit , who's mine or my users?

Question

Suppose I have a script that pulls in a Twitter username with PHP without a call to the Twitter API and I send this value over to Javascript where the user on their client machine makes a call to the twitter API and gets some public Twitter data in XML and then sends it over to a page where I continue to parse it in PHP. Suppose I dont touch the Twitter API serverside. I assume that the users own rate limit is affected in this scenario? I am not using OAuth in this example, as I need to only access public timeline data. Is it right to assume that the rate limit is affecting each individual user instead of my applications server? Meaning that as long as each individual user does not try to access the API over 150 or 200 times in a hour, my applications in the clear?

Answer 1

Yes, the user's rate limit will be affected in this case, not your server's.

Twitter will rate limit the IP address from which the request was made. So every user of your website will get 150 (or whatever the number is) calls per hour.

If multiple users are connected via the same IP (say a home router with a single IP), then their collective calls will be rate-limited. So if user 1 on that network makes 50 calls, then user 2 on that same network is only allowed 100 calls.