use AWS EC2, I regularly rent out 15 core machine with 32GB ram for 1$ per hour, you can try getting an instance in a spot market which 20-3% cheaper (though you need to be careful).
0 karma · joined February 10, 2011
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.
The biggest difficulty with twitter is that there is no way to get the social network, and the REST API was the only way of getting it.
Thus any deep social network based analytics are difficult to perform.