Much of the query API is available without authenticating. However, if you want private information about users or want to write to the site, then you'll need to authenticate. There is also a much higher request limit for authenticated applications. Without authenticating, a single IP address is limited to 300 requests a day. With an authenticated application, this limit is raised to 10,000 requests.
Tip
Rate limits
Many social media sites use rate limits in their APIs. These limits are in place to prevent you from overloading the site, and also to save you from asking for too much data. Twitter processes more than 4,000 tweets a second. Without very special preparation, your infrastructure would quickly be overwhelmed if you were to process them all.
Again, this is a site that makes use of OAuth to authorize users. However, they make use of OAuth 2.0, which is much easier than the OAuth 1.0a we used in the previous chapter. We'll limit ourselves to making use of public information...