When will the firehose be ready?
We thought the “firehose” (the near-realtime stream of all public status updates on Twitter) would be shipped by February 2009, but the deadline has slipped a bit. We’ve pushed back our timeline for testing with a small group of trusted partners to Q2 2009. The firehose is a stream HTTP solution; a client connects to it and the stream begins, ceasing only when the client disconnects. Once we’re confident in the stability of the service, we’ll add partners on a case-by-case basis. We may allow a wider selection of clients to consume subsets of the public stream (that is, updates from a collection of user IDs or matching specific search terms). We do not intend to allow anonymous, unregulated public access to this stream for any number of legal, financial, and technical reasons.
