Twitter API and rate limiting - I am confused

Question

I am new to the Twitter API, and I looked at their whitelisting policies and I am a little confused... I'm basically writing a twitter aggregrator that crawls the public tweets of a set of users (not more than 200) hourly. I wanted to apply for whitelisting, and they seem to offer account based and IP based whitelisting. Since I am using a shared hosting, my outbound IP address might vary (and twitter does'nt allow IP ranges for whitelisting). So I am considering using account based whitelisting.

However, while using OAuth, is it possible for me to use account based whitelisting for a background process that crawls the API hourly?

Answer 1

You won't be able to whitelist each of the 200 accounts you want to crawl. However. Assuming each of those 200 has OAuthd with you, you can use their access token to crawl their timelines. This eats into their rate limits, not the one for your service. This has the obvious downside of eating into their rate limits though.