English

Alternative forms

• firehose

Noun

fire hose ‎(plural fire hoses)

1. A hose designed to deliver water to douse a fire, usually much stronger and wider in diameter than a garden hose.
2. (idiomatic) Any fast, heavy stream (e.g. of information).

   She felt she was standing in front of a fire hose of instructions, trying to absorb them all with a sponge.

3. (computing) A feed of all updates to a website.
   • 2012, Rob Garner, Search and Social: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Content Marketing, John Wiley & Sons (ISBN 9781118283417), page 286

     Links contained within feeds (RSS, fire hose, syndicated)

   • 2013, Marty Weintraub, Lauren Litwinka, The Complete Social Media Community Manager's Guide: Essential Tools and Tactics for Business Success, John Wiley & Sons (ISBN 9781118605424), page 172

     This is cool because, even though the YouTube firehose is on full blast, you only need an instance of the feed and from that firehose, you can filter out what you need for alerts for as many keywords as you like.

   • 2013, Murray Dick, Search: Theory and Practice in Journalism Online, Palgrave Macmillan (ISBN 9781137350343), page 85

     However, it is worth bearing in mind that even those services with access to the Twitter 'firehose' (direct API) do not have anything even approaching a complete Twitter archive.

   • 2013, Nigel Bradley, Marketing Research: Tools and Techniques, Oxford University Press (ISBN 9780199655090)

     Here we will briefly consider web crawlers, webscraping software, data feeds (RSS and other feeds, firehoses etc), human cutting and pasting, panels, MROCs, Netnography, and text analytics.

4. (idiomatic, colloquial) A human ****.

Translations

See also

• firehose (verb)
• garden hose
• See also Wikisaurus:****