People Browsr, the parent company to Kred, has been granted a temporary restraining order against Twitter. This court order will prevent Twitter from restricting People Browsr's access to the tweets and data that is key to providing real-time statistical analysis sought by the company's clients.
"We relied on Twitter's promise of openness when we invested millions of dollars and thousands of hours of development time," PeopleBrowsr CEO Jodee Rich said in a blog post. "Long term supply is essential as this industry matures. We made this application to ensure full unrestricted access to the Firehose for our Enterprise and Government clients."
PeopleBrowsr said that it had paid Twitter $1 million a year for the past four years for access to the firehose. So why did Twitter abruptly cut off People Browsr? People Browsr claims that Twitter gave them no "substantial rational for termination" and simply informed them through a 90-day warning back in July. The only feedback Twitter offered was that the social network was moving toward using third-party syndication services, Gnip and DataSift, for feeding third-party developers with access to the Firehose.
The two parties will be back in court on January 8, 2013 for a hearing to discuss the injunction.
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