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By "roll our own" do you mean you just used the twitter streaming API? Did that have enough data?


Yes, Twitter streaming API plus several other data sources (Facebook, Reddit, forums, etc.). It's enough for us since we're always filtering by keywords or users. We were also granted elevated access.


What was the process like for elevated access? I'm deciding between using Gnip or Twitter's streaming API today actually.


It was pretty straightforward in our case. We had to show them that we had use cases that weren't feasible with the default access level and also demonstrate that we weren't competing with their user experience at all. Not sure how much it mattered but we had been using their streaming API for almost as long as it existed.


I had the same question when I read this. The streaming API is only a fraction of the data offered by the firehose, but that's not as much of a problem in every use case.




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