Whats the Data Mining Feed and can I have access to it?
The Data Mining Feed is an expanded version of our /statuses/public_timeline REST API method. It returns 600 recent public statuses, cached for a minute at a time. You can request it up to once per minute to get a representative sample of the public statuses on Twitter. We offer this for free (and with no quality of service guarantees) to researchers and hobbyists. All we ask is that you provide a brief description of your research or project and the IP address(es) you’ll be requesting the feed from; just fill out this form. Note that the Data Mining Feed is not intended to provide a contiguous stream of all public updates on Twitter; please see above for more information on the forthcoming “firehose” solution.