

Twitter Announces Fire Hose Marketplace: Up to 10k Keyword Filters for 30 Cents - Tichy
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_announces_fire_hose_marketplace_up_to_10k.php

======
dotBen
30c... an hour

 _which is ((24x7x52)/12)x$0.3 = $218.40 a month_

~~~
bigiain
Or from another perspective...

140 million tweets per day[1] / 24hr / $0.30 = 19.5million tweets per dollar.

_Surely_ there's some valuable data to be gleaned out of 20million tweets?

[1] wildly assuming Techcruch's numbers are connected with reality -
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/14/new-twitter-
stats-140m-twee...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/14/new-twitter-
stats-140m-tweets-sent-per-day-460k-accounts-created-per-day/)

~~~
PanMan
From their pricing calculator it seems the deliver max 2k tweets per hour. Way
less than your 6 million, and not that useful.

------
kmfrk
> Thanks to Qwerly integration, when you look at a Twitter @username -
> Mediasift sees more than just the Twitter profile. It sees @username who has
> bookmarks saved online, plans for public events to attend, photos shared
> publicly with friends, check-ins to places around town and much more. Any of
> those are like columns in a spreadsheet of Twitter search results. Show me
> Tweets with any of the following keywords by people planning to attend event
> A and who have been to place B or C. Thanks to Qwerly, Twitter didn't just
> get a giant new developer search and filter feature - it got integration
> with a whole lot of other social services.

Thank God I use different pseudonyms on the internet. That just gives me the
willies.

\---

On another note, this may come at a very opportune time when the Obama 2012 is
kicking into gear.

~~~
pstack
I don't see a problem with it. If you use twitter, then you clearly don't have
a problem living your life in the open and the price of being an attention
whore is getting attention. For those of us who don't need to play-by-play our
every thought and action in 140 character narration throughout the day to our
imagined hoards of clingy worshippers, it won't be a problem. We likely don't
use twitter or we don't use the same identity as we do elsewhere. I mean, as
much as I'd kind of like to have all of my identities tied together, I don't
like the potential problems that may draw. Therefore, I use a different
identity at HN than I do at Slashdot which is different than on LinkedIn which
is different than on Amazon, which is different than on Steam, which is
different than on XBOX Live.

Yeah, people like you and I are still open to having any anonymity data-mined
out of us through aggregate manipulation -- but at least it's a simple layer
of abstraction.

In the meantime, if someone can get rich using the wealth of public
information that every vapid college girl posting a thousand twitpics a night
from her cell at the club puts up online, then more power to them.

------
mduvall
Despite being "dirt cheap" for potential clients such as companies, I find the
30 cent barrier an awkward price point since people who will want the data are
probably willing to pay more, and it definitely bars the casual developer from
access to social data.

~~~
mark_l_watson
There is always the garden hose sample feed from Twitter. Or, use this service
for short test intervals.

Seems like data hackers are being taken care of.

Also, if you want a lot of social media cheaply, check out the sample web app
for Google Buzz that runs on AppEngine. I ran it last summer with some of my
own filters. I could run it about 5 hours a day before I hit the limit of a
free AppEngine account - so it would not cost too much to pay to keep a
derivative of this example program running 24x7.

------
OstiaAntica
This is a vastly better business model than the dickbar.

~~~
dmix
Assuming other companies can figure out how to monetize the tweets and be able
to keep paying to access the firehouse.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I've always said the ultimate Twitter business model is to know what everyone
in the world is thinking right now, and to sell that information.

------
jrockway
Nice. Another service that I'm not going to give free data to anymore.

~~~
Splines
I sort of have this feeling too, but Twitter _is_ a business after all, and
hosting god-knows-how-many twits can't be cheap.

Sure, they could do something else instead of selling data, but until end
users pony up for the service, then they're the product.

~~~
chc
Actually, God has told us how many tweets they're hosting, and tweets are
mercifully short. As of about a month ago, Twitter says it gets about 140
million tweets per day. Assuming the maximum length of 140 characters, this
means they're storing about 18 GB per day. At Amazon S3 rates (which are
considerably higher than what Twitter pays if they have a working brain
anywhere in their corporate structure), that means that their storage costs
increase by about $1/day. After five years of storage at that rate, their
monthly storage costs (again, at S3 rates) would be around $2000. If they're
making less than $2000 per month with that wealth of data, nickel-and-diming
developers is a drastically misguided underreaction.

I'm not pretending this is all it takes to run Twitter, but I'd be surprised
if storing a few TB a year is a major cost center. (Serving up so many
concurrent users seems like a much bigger and more expensive problem — that's
an average of 1600 tweets per second, to say nothing of readers, and I suspect
tweet rates are very lumpy.)

~~~
dotBen
this is what is known as a straw-man argument, and it does nothing to move the
conversation forward.

Clearly storing just the 'tweet' contents alone would be unhelpful because
what about the username or any of the other 40+ metadata point a tweet
carries.

What about keeping the mechanisms needed to store, sort, search, send those
tweets, etc etc. I could go on.

Also, what were you expecting - Twitter to their business at-cost?

~~~
chc
As far as I can tell, the comment I was replying to was about Twitter's
storage costs. So the fact that my response focused on storage and how much it
costs does not make a strawman, which would involve arguing against something
other than what I was replying to. Moreover, the point of my comment was that
Twitter's storage costs are _not the interesting part of their operation_ , so
your question "Were you expecting … Twitter to run their business at-cost?"
actually is a straw man. You're just repeating what I said, except with
slightly less hard data.

------
ekanes
Among other factors, this will probably increase the degree to which your
twitter username represents your identity online. I'm not saying that's good
or bad, just predicting it'll happen.

------
hop
Why don't they just charge businesses to use the site? And charge relative to
their number of employees or revenue. All on the honor system - you get a
badge by your company name when you pay.

------
waitwhatwhoa
Can someone explain why I can't register the 10k most popular keywords and
then resell arbitrary subsets of that stream to interested entities at pennies
on the... nickel and a quarter?

~~~
flog
Well, it's all in the TOS. You can't resell, and you can't display the tweets.

------
dbard
Surprised it took Twitter this long to monetize this.

------
nivertech
Twitter Announces Fire Hose Marketplace: Up to 10k Keyword Filters for 1/2
cent per minute

