Great post, I've been inching away from Twitter bit by bit since it contracted aids (ads). I generally stay away from social networks nowadays (except Facebook), and stick to Hacker News, as anything remotely interesting ends up there (or on TechCrunch). Sad about Twitter though, I remember a few years back I sucked a 500 million tweet database from Twitter over 2 months using its Search API to do some natural language processing experiments. I applied for the firehose but they never gave me access. And the lack on language meta-data per tweet was killing me (had to analyse everything using probability algorithms and language corpora). Too bad, Twitter, too bad.