Public streams

The following streams offer samples of the public data flowing through Twitter. Once applications establish a connection to a streaming endpoint, they are delivered a feed of Tweets, without needing to worry about polling or REST API rate limits.

Endpoints

• POST statuses / filter
• GET statuses / sample
• GET statuses / firehose

Using the streaming APIs

Connect to the endpoints listed above using the best practices and parameters listed in connecting to a streaming endpoint and streaming API request parameters.

Process data returned by the streaming APIs by following the guidelines in processing streaming data.

There are some streaming messages which are not returned by the REST APIs. See streaming message types for information.

Connections

Each account may create only one standing connection to the public endpoints, and connecting to a public stream more than once with the same account credentials will cause the oldest connection to be disconnected.

Clients which make excessive connection attempts (both successful and unsuccessful) run the risk of having their IP automatically banned.