Twitter nearly downed Valleywag's liveblog of the Steve Jobs keynote yesterday at Macworld. And apparently we weren't the only ones affected. "We seem to be up at the moment, but we had a flood of traffic around the Macworld Keynote this morning," Twitter developer Alex Payne wrote in a Twitter-dedicated Google group yesterday during the speech.

Payne and company fixed the problem, the developer wrote, by increased the API rate limit and disallowing unauthenticated requests to the API. Which means they widened the door into Twitter's database, but installed a more careful bouncer to review who wanted in. Eventually, Twitter got a bit faster. Perhaps it's a good thing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey never made it into this year's keynote. He might have gotten booed off the stage.

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