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Comment by dajohnson89 | Hacker News Reader

Aw that's too bad, I just discovered Emojitracker yesterday and thought it was really cool.

Also: is the service being removed colloquially known as the "Twitter Firehose", or something else? I recently implemented a feature that uses the standard rate-limited API. I went through a lot of pain to get the most out of the rate limits. And people would always ask me "why don't you just get all the tweets through the Streaming API?". I wonder if I had done that, how screwed I would be now.

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So, Twitter has long had two different classes of access:

- "Twitter Developer" access - which is what you find here: https://dev.twitter.com/ - that includes a streaming API that is relatively limited in terms of volume of data and operators that are allowed, but is free and open

- Gnip Twitter access - this is commercial access that would include the Firehose option (though that's not very common). But basically this is a paid offering that offers much more functionality than the developer platform.

In this specific case, the author is just losing elevated access to the streaming API:

https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/reference/post/statuses/fi...

I'm guessing they had extra keywords or multiple connections available so they could track those keywords. Nothing to do with the firehose or anything else. Just a user who had an exception to the official policy that's being taken away.

For a long time twitter has offered specific developers who were doing projects they thought were interesting the ability to consumer a higher volume of traffic using the standard streaming endpoints.

It's hard to sort out the colloquial terms for Twitter features from what the company calls them =/

Okay, here we go:

- Twitter Firehose - full stream of all Tweets, commercial

- Twitter Decahose - 10% sample of Tweets for analysis, commercial

- Twitter Powertrack - real-time streaming of posts based on query (country, language, keyword, etc.), commercial

- Twitter Full-archive API - search interface for entire corpus of Tweets, commercial

- Twitter Streaming API - a mini-powertrack of posts based on basic keyword searches (up to 400 keywords), free

- Twitter Streaming Sample - a small sampling of Tweets for statistical analysis, free

There's a couple more esoteric product offerings from a data perspective, but these are the relevant ones. I think it's a pretty broad breadth of different options, with different functionality at the free and commercial options.

What did emojitracker do?

http://www.emojitracker.com/

It still does, for a few more weeks.

http://emojitracker.com/

Basically live tracks tweets that use emoji, so emoji are ranked by frequency.

Emojitracker gives live, realtime usage numbers for all emoji used on twitter.

http://emojitracker.com/

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