Twitter needs to stop fucking around and charge for their API (with metered pricing). Currently, their incentives are to restict access to save money and bandwidth. If they charge money, their incentives will be the opposite: encourage as many developers to use as much as possible. It'll suck for the casual developer that wants to build a free app on the Twitter platform, but it's clear that there's enough demand for the platform that is has some value.
Twitter is charging. Just indirectly through Gnip. I think their reasoning is more to keep the API from going down then trying to save money and bandwidth.
From Twitter's biz perspective this is probably a good thing. They keep the social network bits that might potentially be monetized and let third-party devs create pretty chrome around the streaming data that most users interact with.
"We also want to acknowledge that there are going to be some things that developers want to do that just aren’t supported by the platform. Rather than granting additional privileges to accommodate those requests, we encourage developers to focus on what's possible within the rich variety of integration options already provided. Developers interested in elevated access to the Twitter stream for the purpose of research or analytics can contact our partner Gnip for more
information."
Dear Developers, we’re cutting you out now that we think the value of our company is in the aggregate data.
This is going to be a big problem for companies that are doing analytics with twitter data. If I were twitter I would allow other companies to sell their data so that developers have other ways to obtain twitter data. Having GNIP be the only reseller of twitter data will keep the price too high. Maybe twitter wants to discourage people from accessing twitter through other platforms thereby forcing people to have to go through #newtwitter. What ever the reasoning, this results in less innovation on the twitter platform.
Not really, the streaming API is key for this and this says nothing about being granted additional streaming API permissions. In analytics terms being able to stream based on keywords and follow users is much more effective than anything having all those queries was giving.
They are really deprecating whitelisted REST apps in favor of their streaming API. The streaming API is WAY better, especially for time sensitive apps.
REST API and Streaming API are like apples and oranges, a lot of things just cant be done with the streaming api.Esp. accessing past tweets, search results, social network etc.
A good thing about twitter was that their social network was more open than the facebook's social network, with newer rate limits its going to be really difficult to crawl it.
