> Maybe make it heavier cached ("slower" time before new tweets are available, less infrastructure costs) but wouldn't disable it fully.
This. I had a brief flirtation with working with people using the Twitter API for research purposes. A very large majority of them didn't care about having the latest tweets coming off the firehose, but instead getting access to all the old data. At least at the time, the latter was much more difficult to do.
Things like using Twitter for real time sentiment analysis does require realtime data, but those applications are more likely to be for-profit, and thus could afford to pay.
This. I had a brief flirtation with working with people using the Twitter API for research purposes. A very large majority of them didn't care about having the latest tweets coming off the firehose, but instead getting access to all the old data. At least at the time, the latter was much more difficult to do.
Things like using Twitter for real time sentiment analysis does require realtime data, but those applications are more likely to be for-profit, and thus could afford to pay.