The 2 biggest competitors in the firehose business are Gnip and Datasift. I am pretty curious if Gnip will pivot in a Twitter only firehose or it will continue to serve data from Twitter's competitors.

I wonder if Twitter will be able to use the data from Twitter's competitors transiting Gnip's firehose for their own analytics/machine learning/relevance purposes. (From a legal standpoint that is, I'm sure they have the technical chops to do so)

Interesting move. Gnip was already their authorized provider for reselling stream data. Guess they figured it'd make more-sense to just bring the whole thing in-house.