Twitter Revoking Elevated Access To Streaming API For Emojitracker
Nearly three years since they officially blessed it with “partner” access (and after 14 billion emoji tweets tracked), Twitter has decided to shut Emojitracker down. To be more accurate, they are removing its elevated access to the Streaming API that Emojitracker depends on in order to operate at its high volume:
I understand why Emojitracker is getting its privileged access revoked; a firehose stream is precious scarce resource and expensive to maintain for free. Twitter wants to be able to sell the elevated stream to people, so giving it away to fun apps like Emojitracker undermines the value of it.
In this particular instance, Twitter’s actions are probably reasonable and fair. However, it did twig my mind about something. I am yet to see any positive change in Twitter developer policy following Dorsey’s apology and promise to make things better. Maybe good stuff is in the pipeline and it hasn’t surfaced yet to the world. I hope so. Ironically, Jack Dorsey publicised Emojitracker just two months ago. Now, his company is shutting it down.