Twitter cuts off ‘firehose’ access, eyes Big Data bonanza by Mike Wheatley.
From the post:
Twitter upset the applecart on Friday when it announced it would no longer license its stream of half a billion daily tweets to third-party resellers.
The social media site said it had decided to terminate all current agreements with third parties to resell its ‘firehose’ data – an unfiltered, full stream of tweets and all of the metadata that comes with them. For companies that still wish to access the firehose, they’ll still be able to do so, but only by licensing the data directly from Twitter itself.
Twitter’s new plan is to use its own Big Data analytics team, which came about as a result of its acquisition of Gnip in 2014, to build direct relationships with data companies and brands that rely on Twitter data to measure market trends, consumer sentiment and other metrics that can be best understood by keeping track of what people are saying online. The company hopes to complete the transition by August this year.
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Not that I had any foreknowledge of Twitter’s plans but I can’t say this latest move is all that surprising.
What I hope also emerges from the “new plan” is a fixed pricing structure for smaller users of Twitter content. I’m really not interested in an airline pricing model where the price you pay has no rational relationship to the value of the product. If it’s the day before the end of a sales quarter I get a very different price for a Twitter feed than mid-way through the quarter. That sort of thing.
Along with being able to specify users to follow/searches and tweet streams in daily increments of 250,000, 500,000, 750,000, 1,000,000, where they are spooled for daily pickup over high speed connections (to put less stress on infrastructure).
I suppose renewable contracts would be too much to ask? 😉