> Our platform retrieves or refreshes around 400 user profiles per second (this is managed using 4 high-bandwidth servers co-located with instagram’s API servers on AWS).
Interesting, since Instagram's API only allows 5,000 requests per hour, (http://instagram.com/developer/limits/) and does not support bulk requests of user data. How does this application bypass this limit?
Hi minimaxir. We have a large number of tokens from our clients and people doing oauth to access our free demo. Since the data is public, we can use any of these tokens to access hashtags and account followers, etc...
Actually, Instagram API limit is pretty high when compared to other platform. Today we have something like 100k tokens available to us, which means we can make 12bn+ calls everyday. Almost like having a firehose. We don't use all of them but we're one of the top users. Though there are at least 10 bigger users than us on the API (according to them of course). Hope it helps!
> Since the data is public, we can use any of these tokens to access hashtags and account followers
I'm fairly certain this isn't an intended use of the API. Kudos to you for posting your method here, but I wouldn't be surprised if your app gets banned because of this (a lot of people at Instagram read HN).
Interesting, when I was at GoDaddy (Website Builder), it seems Facebook had implemented not only a per token limit, but application limits as well that we hit pretty easily. Does Instagram not have the same kind of limits?
For those curious, IIRC it took a while to get our account's limits raised, and we had to implement some request caching to stay under the limits as much as possible. All around, it was interesting.
@yid. I'd be curious to understand why you think they would ban us? For using the tokens this way? Well they know everything about our usage of these tokens, and any analytics tool out there behave similarly, right?
> For using the tokens this way? Well they know everything about our usage of these tokens, and any analytics tool out there behave similarly, right?
Yes, for using what are intended as per-user activity tokens for public scraping (which the user who has been issued the token has not requested). As you said, you can assemble a firehose using this method, and if they'd wanted apps to access a firehose, they'd have come up with an API for it.
Interesting, since Instagram's API only allows 5,000 requests per hour, (http://instagram.com/developer/limits/) and does not support bulk requests of user data. How does this application bypass this limit?