As I realized after Twitter's "developer" conference last year, the era of the Twitter hacker is coming to a close (see http://twitter.com/#!/dacort/status/1200

As I realized after Twitter's "developer" conference last year, the era of the Twitter hacker is coming to a close (see http://twitter.com/#!/dacort/status/12005978721 http://twitter.com/#!/dacort/status/12005978721 and http://twitter.com/#!/dacort/status/12032959629 http://twitter.com/#!/dacort/status/12032959629). If you are not building a business on their platform where money will pass into their business, good luck. And who can blame them, providing 100,000 user tweets isn't free. Not sure where he got the idea he would never have to start paying. Turning off basic auth also hastened this demise - whereas you could once pull whatever data you wanted from Twitter using a simple curl command, now you have to figure out OAuth. It's not that much of a challenge, but it is enough of a barrier to entry to dissuade somebody who's got a couple hours on the weekend and wants to have some fun. Finally, their partnership with Gnip is yet another indicator that this is simply not the days of the wild west anymore. You want the data, you'll have to pay.