Twitter Offers Metered Pricing for Firehose of Tweets

Twitter data is a hot commodity for all sorts of projects, including search, brand monitoring and customer relationship management. But pricing and access to its data is not something the company has prioritized. Starting today, one much-clamored-for Twitter data option has been made available: Filtering the full, ever-growing real-time Twitter data set for keywords on a per-tweet basis. Gnip, Twitter’s only official data reseller, will give customers access at a cost of 10 cents per thousand tweets in a new joint product called “Power Track.”

For back story, Twitter has for the last year sold access to its “Firehose” real-time stream of every tweet to companies like Google and Microsoft. It gives other developers access to a random sampling of tweets (a.k.a. the “Gardenhose” and “Spritzer.”) Then in November it gave Gnip permission to sell more precise sampler products like the Decahose (10 percent of tweets for $5,000 per month).

But many companies, especially social media monitors, would rather get just the relevant tweets from the total data set. With Gnip’s Power Track they’ll be able to avoid Twitter’s polling rate limits and get exactly what they want, for a fee.

As for the actual Twitter users slaving away to produce those 140 character updates? No, they don’t get a cut.

This story was updated to correct Power Track pricing.