Social intelligence service DataSift says its Twitter firehose access expires August, bemoans impact on its customers and their customers, touts Facebook access
Twitter Ends its Partnership with DataSift - Firehose Access Expires on August 13, 2015 — For several months now …
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter is pulling its firehose back in-house. After years of licensing full-firehose access to resellers, it has cut off third-party data partners DataSift and NTT Data at once — DataSift's access expires August 13, 2015 — while Twitter builds its own big-data business on top of the stream. The timing matters: IBM had just launched developer tools and cloud services mining Twitter data in March, showing how valuable licensed firehose access had become to enterprise vendors.
DataSift's response is to reframe itself around a different walled garden, touting its Facebook access as the substitute for the Twitter feed it is losing. The move lands on a sector already feeling platform squeeze — analytics service ThinkUp would later shut down citing API restrictions from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
First-order effects
- DataSift's customers — and their own downstream customers — lose Twitter-derived social intelligence products after August 13, forcing DataSift to sell them Facebook-based analysis instead.
- NTT Data faces the same cutoff simultaneously, so the entire third-party Twitter firehose resale channel goes dark for both firms on Twitter's schedule, not theirs.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise buyers who built pipelines on resold Twitter data must renegotiate directly with Twitter's in-house offering, converting former partners into competitors with privileged access.
- Rival platforms gain leverage: Facebook becomes the default alternative for social analytics vendors like DataSift, shifting which network's terms and pricing govern the market.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Twitter also dictating who may use the firehose downstream, as with Dataminr barring US intelligence agencies — platforms will treat their data streams as strategic assets rationed case-by-case rather than commodities sold broadly, and the social-analytics industry restructures around whatever access each platform deigns to grant.
The trend: Social platforms are recomposing their moats by clawing back licensed data access from resellers and monetizing it in-house, deciding per-customer who gets the firehose at all.