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 the plug on the reseller tier of its data business: DataSift's firehose access ends August 13, 2015, and per TechCrunch the same cutoff hits NTT Data, as Twitter builds an in-house big data operation rather than licensing the full stream to intermediaries. The move lands a month after IBM launched developer tools mining Twitter data, showing how much enterprise demand for the stream had accumulated around licensed partners.
DataSift's public response is telling: it warns that its customers — and their customers downstream — will feel the loss, while promoting its Facebook access as the alternative source of social data. The episode previews a year in which platform-controlled access keeps tightening, from Twitter restricting Dataminr's intelligence-agency reach to ThinkUp shutting down over API limits.
First-order effects
- DataSift and NTT Data lose their core product input on August 13, forcing immediate re-architecture of social-intelligence offerings built on full-firehose Twitter data — DataSift is already steering customers toward Facebook-derived datasets.
- Downstream buyers of social analytics lose a vendor-backed route to complete Twitter data, since Twitter intends to serve big-data use cases itself rather than through resellers.
Second-order effects
- Competing platforms gain leverage: DataSift touting Facebook access turns other networks' data into the substitute good, strengthening Facebook's hand when pricing its own data partnerships.
- Twitter's decision to keep the firehose in-house puts it in direct competition with former partners like IBM's newly announced Twitter-mining toolchain, converting a licensing relationship into a channel conflict.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that follows — Twitter dictating who may even route its firehose, as with the reported bar on US intelligence agencies using Dataminr, and ThinkUp's shutdown over API restrictions — points to platform data access becoming a selectively granted privilege rather than a sellable commodity.
- If firehose economics consolidate at the platform layer, third-party social-analytics firms survive only by multi-sourcing across networks, shifting their value from exclusive data access to cross-platform modeling.
The trend: Social platforms are recomposing their moats by retracting wholesale data access and monetizing the firehose themselves, leaving resellers to compete on analysis rather than exclusivity.