Thousands of developers rely on Twitter’s APIs to build their apps and Websites. In time for this week’s Chirp conference for Twitter developers, Apigee is coming out of public beta and launching a special dashboard to keep track of the Twitter API.
Apigee is a Google Analytics for APIs. For developers who rely on data from other sites and companies, it monitors how much data they are using (message requests), the error rate, response times, and downstream users. For the Twitter API, Apigee added the number of Tweets and retweets going through a developers app, as well as the location of users on a map for geo-coded tweets. For instance a developer with a Twitter iPhone client could use Apigee to monitor how many times an hour his app is making data calls to Twitter.
Since Twitter places rate limits on developers in terms of how many Tweets per hour and other data can go through their apps, keeping track of that usage is important to be able to manage that for developers. One added bonus for smaller developers who are not on Twitter’s whitelist is that if they access Twitter’s APIs through Apigee via OAuth they get upgraded to Apigee’s 20,000 requests/hour (compared to 150 requests per hour for many developers).
Apigee also includes a handy API debugger and the service is free.