Thursday night Twitter engineer Alex Payne finally acknowledged the obvious regarding the firehose – the full stream of data sought after by third-party developers to add back the long-withheld Track service. Twitter executives have been all over the map on this, sending developers on a wild goose chase to obtain access to the XMPP stream that the company has failed to provide since May.
Payne’s post describes how Twitter provided the firehose “on an experimental basis some months ago, but had to limit its distribution to just a few subscribers while we worked on technical hurdles.” At BearHug Camp, developers were told to contact Gnip as an intermediary, but now Payne says Twitter has decided to keep the service in-house with a newly-staffed team and yet another undetermined delta between promise and reality.
