PeopleBrowsr today announced that it has settled its lawsuit against Twitter to prevent Twitter from blocking PeopleBrowsr’s access to the Twitter firehose of data. As a result of the settlement, PeopleBrowsr will maintain firehose access through the end of the year, and then transition to accessing Twitter data via one of the authorized data resellers.
The settlement was reached out of court; the company did not disclose terms of the deal. The San Francisco Court of Appeals has dismissed the case.
Kred CEO Andrew Grill called it a “great outcome,” and told me that both sides are very happy with the settlement. Putting the questions around the court case behind them will allow the company to regain a 100% of its efforts on new products as well as the custom analytics implementations that PeopleBrowsr has been developing for corporate clients.
The case had been closely watched by many in the industry, raising issues around open access to Twitter data, touching on anti-trust issues, and raising questions around PeopleBrowsr’s long-term viability should it have lost the access to the Twitter data that it leverages for corporate clients via a suite of analytics products.
For now, it seems, everyone’s figured out how share the sandbox again: PeopleBrowsr has regained its rights to the Twitter data; Twitter has defended its right to manage access to that data on its own terms.
We now live in a world where data sharing among applications and companies is fundamental to how we do business. Do you think the industry will see more cases such as this one as the various stakeholders work through the issues this raises?
