This is a really neat approach! A friend of mine actually did his thesis working with Netflix to analyze Twitter and determine if Netflix was down[1]. He took a

This is a really neat approach! A friend of mine actually did his thesis working with Netflix to analyze Twitter and determine if Netflix was down[1]. He took a much more brute force approach, taking advantage of the fact that his search space was limited to re-assemble a "firehose" for a given search term leveraging hitting the search API from multiple machines and then reconciling the stream and removing duplicates. This approach definitely wouldn't scale to the entirety of the firehose, but I think that, in general, interest in Twitter data revolves around more specific queries. [1] https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~eaugusti/pages/papers/docs/SPOONS:%20Netflix%20Outage%20Detection%20Using%20Microtext%20Classification%20-%202013.pdf https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~eaugusti/pages/papers/docs/SPOON...