Any ideas on how the new Twitter API rules will affect researchers working with TwapperKeeper, DiscoverText, etc?

Twitter has not yet specified how many API calls will be available per call type. For example, if I want to make a *followers_ids* call, it is unclear how many times I can do this within an hour. For researchers using a regular API key, the limit used to be 350 (?) or 150 (?). The rate limit after the changes might be going down.

So for researchers who need to make the same API call over and over again (get graph info, get user info, etc...) this might get much more challenging.

Broadly speaking, this is going to make it more challenging to do any form of research or data mining on Twitter. I'm sure the tool developers will find ways to work around it (the one that seems simplest would be batching and self-limiting API calls), but that can only be bad for those of us who do a lot of social monitoring work. We can only hope Twitter will issue guidelines for anyone engaging in social media monitoring - a service most social platforms don't do a great job at evangelising the utility of even on a good day.