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Twitter yanks firehose from DataSift, other resellers

Time to Gnip third party raw-slurping in the bud

Twitter has aggressively taken control of its firehose and severed third party reseller access to it as the microblabbing site moves to grow its analytics biz following the buyout of Gnip last year.

DataSift was one of the biggest players to be affected by the decision. Its CEO Nick Halstead confirmed the partnership with Twitter was coming to an end in a miserable statement posted on the outfit's website today.

One of the firm's customers, who got in touch with The Register following the announcement, told us: "DataSift's Twitter data is important to our app and if it goes away it will be a problem for us and others like it."

Late on Friday, Gnip said in a blog post that "the best way to support the distribution of Twitter data is to have direct data relationships with its data customers – the companies building analytic solutions using Twitter’s data and platform."

Behind the scenes, DataSift failed to to renegotiate a deal with Twitter, following months of talks with the publicly-traded, profit-lite company.

Halstead, who was keen to big up his big data partnership with Facebook following the breakdown of relations with Twitter, said:

DataSift’s customers will be able to access Twitter’s firehose of data as normal until August 13th, 2015.

After that date all the customers will need to transition to other providers to receive Twitter data.

This is an extremely disappointing result to us and the ecosystem of companies we have helped to build solutions around Twitter data.

Gnip said that it had been slowly moving away from resellers that processed raw Twitter data for commercial use and added that it expected the transition to be completed by August this year. ®

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