API Guidelines
People have been asking what the restrictions are sorrounding the API and it’s usage. So along with the official Terms & Conditions of Use, which aren’t exactly the easiest reading we decided to put together a nice simple Do’s & Don’ts document to help and guide those of you who are looking for best practice guidelines.
Do
- Create fun cool applications and tools based around our API. (and tell us about them so that we can write about them over on our blog!)
- Integrate our re-tweet features into your applications and websites.
- Be sensible with the number of times you access the API – hit it too often and you’ll hit restrictions and no one wants that.
- Let us know if you hit the API limit.
- Put forward suggestions for extending the API – please remember suggestions need to be scalable.
- Use our documentation to help guide you in creating your applications
- Ask us if you have questions
Don’t
- Don’t re-create our button without including the (via @tweetmeme) this breaks our terms and conditions of use.
- Don’t go using our API to mimic our site as this also breaks our terms & conditions of use.
- Don’t try to hit our servers with thousands of requests per second.
- Don’t re-create our plugins using our api without gaining permission first (this includes the WordPress ones)
- Don’t re-create our widget using our api
- Don’t copy our artwork without permission
- Lets just say don’t copy what we’ve already done… or anything that we release

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