I was looking at some APIs like twitter, google APIs. From what I understand in this link, http://www.quora.com/Tor/How-does-Tor-work, crudely put, Tor masks IP of the initiator
I was wondering whether it is possible to overcome these rate limits by temporarily using Tor? like switch to Tor network when you start receiving rate limited errors and switch back to normal mode after some time. I also see that Tor network is real slow these days. I would like to know if anyone has tried this. Please let me know. Thanks.
Tor is in fact abused by people wanting to overcome rate limits. If you take this route instead of the proper way by working together with the sites providing the APIs you will likely find that the Tor-exits is already rate limited/blocked due to earlier abuse.