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They’ve acquired the company Gnip a few years ago, which then became the exclusive reseller of Twitter firehose data.

Their biggest competitor is Datasift, which has similar exclusive deals with Facebook and Linkedin.

There’s an incredibly big market here, with customers ranging from social media analytics companies to investment firms.

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When they bought GNIP they ended their partnership with DataSift. It was a major blow to DataSift. It was a shrewd move on Twitter's part. My company switched over to using GNIP and our DataSift sales rep told us tons of other customers switched too and that he was leaving because of it.

Yep, that’s correct. The recent lawsuit against LinkedIn about crawling [1] is interesting, though. It sets the precedent that third parties cannot be blocked from crawling, which technically means anyone could do this with Twitter as well.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft-linked...

TIL marketing to bots is a thing. /s

Like any other media platform there's advantages and disadvantages. Twitter is fantastic if you're trying to reach media professionals or developers in my experience.

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