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Comment by huffmsa | Hacker News Reader

Side bar, if only Twitter would realize this and turn the firehose back on and charge $x per month for API access.

They'd be profitable in a month.

Twitter do charge for the firehose, and I hear it’s a reasonable amount of revenue. A person can’t go and buy it on a credit card, but there are authorised sellers, enterprise sales people, etc.

Bear in mind that it’s a large technical feat to be able to ingest the firehose effectively, so it’s not really suitable for consumers.

I mean sell it piecemeal. Add a butt ton of endpoints. Make it easy to use, easy to integrate. Sell it on credit card.

What do you mean piecemeal? Like random subset? Go answered why not the whole thing already.

Do you know what the current bitrate is? In 2011 I looked into buying this but gave up because it was too hard to buy. Twitter was pretending at the time that it was hard to process so much data, but it was incredibly easy as long as you don't do it in Ruby.

I don't know, but I imagine part of the reason for using resellers now is probably support contracts and stuff like that which go along with it. I'd imagine they also sell custom firehoses that pre-filter certain data, etc.

> but there are authorised sellers

I don't believe this is true. It used to be the case but Twitter went and put all API sales under Gnip.

Given the number of times people assert this, I think Twitter must have explored this option and decided it wasn't a viable option. I don't know why, but I'll assume that they're smart enough to have decided against it for a good reason.

I would not make the assumption. I've been working for corporate America long enough to know that there's an astonishing level of incompetence many places. I'm sure Twitter is no exception. I'm sure _someone_ at Twitter has considered this, but perhaps they work for someone who doesn't "get it." Among many other possibilities.

They'd probably take a lot of flak from an ethical perspective though (scandal level). I suspect people would not be too excited to know Twitter straight up sells their content

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