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I would welcome it if they would give everybody access to their firehose api (against payment), and not just to their buddies...

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It's probably not trivial to put the firehose in place. Until they have some way of reliably and scalably opening it up and charging for it, close partners are probably the only practical customers.

400 tweets/sec + metadata comes out to less than 0.5 mbit/sec or approx 4.5 GB/day. That's less than a dollar daily in traffic costs at the Amazon rates, lowest tier.

One can see why they don't want everyone and their mother pulling it, but it's hardly rocket-science, once the infrastructure is set up.

Having worked with the stream; yes, not trivial, but also not very hard. Just ask @blaine.

Presumably Twitter is doing this because they have limited time, and they feel like giving priority to YC companies makes sense because they are well vetted.

It's not a great system, but even a bad policy is sometimes a step in the right direction.

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