Not only that, but he called their bluff... and lost. As per a comment by Paul Buchheit himself: "To be clear, Twitter has made available a realtime replacemen

Not only that, but he called their bluff... and lost. As per a comment by Paul Buchheit himself: "To be clear, Twitter has made available a realtime replacement for the firehose (the replacement is called "birddog"). We have not yet started consuming that new API because we're waiting for the lawyers to come to agreement on the terms of use, which I hope will happen soon. I think Twitter's legal team is simply overbooked at the moment."