Twitter to Turn Off Firehose

Twitter is planning to cut off access to its data 'firehose' - the stream of tweets and related information it currently provides to third party vendors.

The firm sells this data to third parties - such as UK-based social media filtering platform Datasift - looking to glean insights from online consumer conversations. A year ago, Twitter acquired one of these third parties, Gnip, which had been the first authorized reseller of its 'Firehose' data stream back in 2010. Following this acquisition, Twitter has decided to bring all data licensing activity in-house.

In a company blog, Datasift CEO and founder Nick Halstead said that his firm's business model had never relied on access to Twitter data, as its own big data processing platform is capable of dealing with billions of interactions a day from twenty other social media and news networks. Despite this, Halstead described Twitter's decision as an 'extremely disappointing result' for the ecosystem of companies Datasift has helped to build solutions around Twitter data. These clients will only have access to Twitter's firehose of data until August 13th.

'Twitter also demonstrated that it doesn't understand the basic rules of this market', Halstead added. 'Social (media) networks make money from engagement and advertising. Revenue from data should be a secondary concern to distribution and it should occur only in a privacy-safe way'.

His firm is currently working with Facebook, to provide access to the latter's topic data, which it says has never been available before.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.