The firehose is pretty revolutionary really. Being able to get every public feed in one feed is pretty easy compared to having to index the whole web like Googl

The firehose is pretty revolutionary really. Being able to get every public feed in one feed is pretty easy compared to having to index the whole web like Google do with blogs and news. I can see one of the reasons they shut it down is that bandwidth cost is going to be very high. I expect if they could charge for it they could open it up - but I expect many of the companies who would like it don't have business models or can't afford it.