That debate has now landed in court. A San Francisco judge on Wednesday granted a temporary restraining order compelling Twitter to continue providing access to its "Firehose" - the full daily stream of some 400 million tweets - to PeopleBrowsr Inc, a data analytics firm that sifts through Twitter and resells that information to clients ranging from technology blogs to the U.S. Department of Defense.
As part of a broader revenue-generating strategy, Twitter in recent months has begun clamping down on how its data stream may be accessed, to the dismay of many third-party developers who have built businesses and products off of Twitter's Firehose.
PeopleBrowsr, which began contracting Firehose access in July 2010, has continued to buy Twitter data on a month-to-month basis until this July, when Twitter invoked a clause in the agreement that allowed for terminating the contract without cause.
The court's decision to extend the two San Francisco-based companies' contract has not settled the legal spat; a judge will hear PeopleBrowsr's arguments for a preliminary injunction against Twitter on January 8.
But the case could provide the first, in-depth look at issues surrounding one of the Internet industry's most prominent players in Twitter.
