Twitter cuts off firehose access for third-party data resellers DataSift and NTT Data as Twitter grows in-house big data business
Twitter Cuts Off DataSift To Step Up Its Own Big Data Business — In the push for more revenue growth, Twitter has been building up its business in areas …
Context & Ripple Effects
DataSift has already told customers its Twitter firehose access expires in August, bemoaning the impact on its clients and theirs — and pointing to Facebook access as the alternative. The cutoff lands just weeks after IBM unveiled developer tools and cloud services mining Twitter data, evidence that partners were building real businesses on top of the pipe.
Twitter is pulling that pipe back in-house: cutting off resellers DataSift and NTT Data while growing its own big data operation, against a backdrop of slowing ad sales that Bloomberg reported Twitter lacks the size and tracking technology to reverse. The firehose is shifting from a wholesale supply relationship to a proprietary revenue line.
First-order effects
- DataSift and NTT Data lose the raw feed underpinning their social-intelligence products in August, forcing them to migrate enterprise customers onto other sources like Facebook or renegotiate directly with Twitter.
- Twitter's own big data business gains a captive market: analytics buyers who previously licensed through resellers must now come to Twitter itself.
Second-order effects
- IBM's Twitter-data tooling now sits on a privileged pipeline that independent resellers no longer have, concentrating the ecosystem around partners Twitter chooses rather than open resale.
- DataSift's pivot to Facebook access pressures rival platforms to court displaced social-analytics demand, making exclusive data licensing a competitive weapon among networks.
Third-order effects
- Selective access becomes the template: a year later Twitter was dictating terms even inside the remaining firehose relationships, reportedly asking Dataminr to bar US intelligence agencies — access granted or withheld case by case at the platform's discretion.
- If the pattern holds, social data monetization consolidates vertically into the platforms themselves, turning API access into a lever of commercial and political control rather than a commodity input.
The trend: Platforms are converting once-open data feeds from wholesale commodities into tightly controlled, in-house monetized assets, with access granted selectively at the owner's discretion.