> I wonder if there's a price point where they could achieve widespread API usage while still making money with standard infrastructure (no custom datacenters, &c.)
What issue do you see here? can you expand?
Ah, I got a bit muddled in my diction here. I was trying to refer to the firehose. The firehose itself should inherently have some useful graph data though, as you would be able to see all the @reply relationships.
> What issue do you see here? can you expand?
I don't have a great handle on the economics here, but I can envision a scenario where:
cost to deliver firehose (engineering, infrastructure) + (marginal cost/user * users) > market value of firehose/user * users
Again, this may sound silly to someone with a better handle on the numbers behind engineering & maintaining this solution. My salient point was just that I'd be curious to find out what kind of value they could extract from the firehose by selling it directly.