Twitter has pulled the plug on its data feed ecosystem by revoking access of its syndicated data feed of all tweets generated throughout the microblogging site, collectively called the ‘Firehose,’ to all partnered third parties.
The move comes as a followup to its acquisition of the social media API aggregation outfit, Gnip, a year ago. For years now, the data feed had been sold to third parties, who in turn made sense of the data to further make the derived actionable insight available to marketers and advertisers of the enterprise.
“After acquiring Gnip in May of 2014, we decided to bring all data licensing activity in-house in order to better serve our customers and partners,” a Twitter spokesperson told Re/code in an email.
One of the partners affected is the social data provider Datasift, had been trying for months to negotiate a fresh contract in lieu of the severance. However, having failed to come to a favourable conclusion, CEO Nick Halstead wrote: “Our business model has never relied on access to Twitter data.”
Datasift is “now working with Facebook, the undisputed largest source of social data on earth, on providing the ecosystem with Facebook topic data,” he said.
Of the matter Gnip noted in its blog post that “the best way to support the distribution of Twitter data is to have direct data relationships with its data customers – the companies building analytic solutions using Twitter’s data and platform.”
Experts are looking at this as a move that might affect Twitter’s revenue as well as overall business essentially by the limitations that will occur in use cases.
Photo credit: CJS*64 A man with a camera / Foter / CC BY-ND
