ICYMI: It has been a long time coming, but Twitter has finally started charging for premium access to their APIs. Until now, you could only access data via the free Twitter API with limitations, or pay to use Gnip at the enterprise level–nothing in between. I’ve long complained about how Twitter restricts access to our tweets, as well as the lack of transparency and honesty around their business model. I’ve complained so much about it, I eventually stopped writing about it, and I never thought I’d see the day where Twitter starts charging for access to their platform.
While I have concerns about Twitter further limiting access to our data by charging for API access, their initial release has some positive signs that give me hope that they are monetizing things in a sensible way. They seem to be focused on monetizing some of the key paint points around Twitter API consumption, like being able to get more access to historical data, offer more Tweets per request, higher rate limits, a counts endpoint that returns time-series counts of Tweets, more complex queries and metadata enrichments, such as expanded URLs and improved profile geo-information. Twitter seems to be thinking about the primary pain we all experience at the lower rungs of Twitter access, and focusing on making the platform more scalable for companies of all shapes and sizes–which has been core to my complaints. https://goo.gl/eJq3Bh #DataIntegration #ML
