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Comment by Veratyr | Hacker News Reader

This is a good start. Gnip seems to basically be invite only (I've tried contacted them multiple times and have not once received a response) and the public API is so limited it's near useless.

I'd still rather everyone move to Mastodon.

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Gnip is Twitter's enterprise API business with annual subscriptions to firehose and decahose access. This is month-to-month billing for improved API access and data quality.

how does this address anything in the parent post?

It points out that Gnip is not “invite only” - it is an enterprise subscription product.

It's effectively invite only because there's no public signup and sales consistently ignores you.

As someone who had a Gnip subscription for years I think "invite only" is close to a fair characterization.

It took huge amounts of effort to get them to return our inquiries. Given the huge amount of money we ended up spending that seemed ridiculous.

But I guess that just got us ready for the whole "everyone must move to Gnip 2.0, but no we won't merge the multiple pull requests to make our official client work with our new API"[1] thing. Wow, that was fun...

[1] https://github.com/twitter/hbc/pulls

Wow... there goes the last shred of sympathy I had for Twitter for not being profitable.

I appreciate semantics and nuance, and often get called a pedant, but you seem to be missing the argument being made. It's not technically 'invite-only' though it in practice, it is 'invite-only.' This looks like a product management shortcoming that seems all too prevalent at Twitter HQ. I say this as someone who was on Twitter in early '08, but quit late'10. I still believe in Twitter's value, which I thought was obvious, then couldn't understand the disinterest, and finally surprised it caught on with the US public. The company really has a long way to go in product management WRT user experience and developer ecosystem.

Mastodon is coming for Twitter.

I think the post was quite clear that it meant "behaves like it is invite only", as others have explained. I have to say, if your job is improving how Twitter looks to developers you are IMHO not doing a very good job of it right now, a lot of your replies appear quite tone-deaf to me.

Something tells me that'd be more tedious to get the same kind of data, what with having to go to several instances to get it, instead of one place.

That sounds like a feature to me.

Exactly. Mastodon makes it easy to get your own data, but hard to get everyone's data.

Not to someone who would be interested in something like these Twitter APIs.

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