Twitter is realtime communication at it finest. They are the breaking news channel. Last year there was earthquake in east bay. First thing I did (even though it was middle of night) was to check my twitter when I sensed the vibrations. And I wasn't disappointed. Within seconds, I knew what was going on and how strong the earthquake was.
The amount of data they generate is humongous and can be very valuable. Data scientists can go through that data can do lot of pattern matching generate interesting insights. From how your product is doing in market or even complex predictions. That sort of stuff twitter wants developer community to build not yet another twitter client.
I think you are confused. What happened (and what this post is about) is they are preventing this kind of application to be built. You can't do pattern matching or whatever without access to the data...
> You can't do pattern matching or whatever without access to the data...
If you want "access to the data", you can get a firehose subscription from gnip.com or datasift.com
I once built an elaborate options pricer, only to find that my "access to the data" - which was basically a scraper from finance.google.com, was cut off. So I switched to finance.yahoo.com and soon enough they cut me off too! So I asked my professor and did what he told me - pay the subscription to IV ( http://www.ivolatility.com/data/historical_data.html ) and voila, the socket was instantly open and I could suck in as much data as I wanted.
It was 10 dollars for a month's access to a few MB of cleaned up csv historical option prices of a specific ticker.
And that's how resellers work - you pay exactly for what you want. Nobody's saying you have to pay 360000, like the other post implies.
Except that for Twitter you do. A few MB = 30 seconds of tweets. I don't know why you think financial feeds are related to twitter, other than both being data feeds.
The $360k price tag is not "implied", it's the actual price for access to 50% of twitter's messages (see the link I posted). 100% access can only be negotiated with Twitter itself. To be fair, from the information I could find, the cheapest plan from gnip is $500/month[1], datasift is $3000/month[2], both quickly go up. That means you can't just whip up a prototype in the weekend for some new idea anymore. This pricing probably filters out 99% of the things that could be built on it, limiting them to projects with investor backing and ready business models (which twitter itself still doesn't have).
I completely agree, there's a huge amount of data there that can be processed in a useful way. The problem is, at what point does something become a Twitter client? IFTTT let people use tweet data in a bunch of interesting ways, not just as another way of displaying things. If anything was using Twitter as a platform, IFTTT was.
The amount of data they generate is humongous and can be very valuable. Data scientists can go through that data can do lot of pattern matching generate interesting insights. From how your product is doing in market or even complex predictions. That sort of stuff twitter wants developer community to build not yet another twitter client.