I am having the same issue.  Started a couple of days ago….

 same issue here.. maybe the caching is not working correctly?

Seeing the same thing here on both Wordpress 2.9.1 and 2.9.2, with latest TwitterWidgetPro.

It could as others have hinted be because the caching is broken? The more frequently the page is loaded, the more often one gets the display "Could not connect to Twitter".

Also, it seems like the custom error message is broken – at least I only get the hardcoded "Could not connect" message, instead of my own "Ooops! Can't talk to Twitter" message.

Is there anything we can turn on locally to debug this, or is the error already reproduced by developer? Anything users can do to help?

I am joining the chorus.  Nearly everytime I go to my site, my down message is up.  The note in the template says that this is because twitter is down, but I am certain that this is not the situation.  Can you please help?  I went with yours because it had the most downloads and the best rating.

Thanks,

Eileen

I ran into the same issues. Alas the author hasnt reacted yet to this thread, so i took a look at the plugin myself.

I believe it says somewhere in the documentation that you can try to increase 'the number of seconds to wait' in case you run into connection issues. What i have seen is that Twitter is sometimes indeed thAt slow that even 5 seconds connection time is not enough.

So, your best bet is to increase that allowed waiting time.

Since i was looking at the code, i thought i might enhance it a bit and maybe Aaron wants to have a look to see if he could improve his plugin likewise. I've changed the code to use the cache when the connection is timed out in stead of throwing an connection error. Ideally a mail would be send to the admin to notify him of the issue.

Furthermore i would like to be able to set the connect interval manually. Currently that interval is fixed to 5 minutes. However, taking the long connection time of Twitter into account and the fact that not all twitter streams are updated that frequently, it would be better if one could adjust the refresh interval to ones own needs – and thus preventing that too many visitors are bothered by the long delay time neccessary to connect to Twitter.

I'm not sure, however, how @anywhere will influence this plugin, for which i do want to thank Aaron anyhow!