fire hose

plural fire hoses · alternative firehose

1. A hose designed to deliver water to douse a fire, usually much stronger and wider in diameter than a garden hose.

   Although the subway structure is of non-combustible material, a fire protection system, with fire hose cabinets on every underground platform, has been provided.

   1954 June, “Yonge Street Subway, Toronto”, in Railway Magazine, page 422

2. idiomaticAny 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. computingA feed of all updates to a website.

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

   2012, Rob Garner, Search and Social: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Content Marketing, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 286

   3 more examples

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

   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, Murray Dick, Search: Theory and Practice in Journalism Online, Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, page 85

   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.

   2013, Nigel Bradley, Marketing Research: Tools and Techniques, Oxford University Press, →ISBN

4. colloquialidiomaticA human penis.

   Synonyms: anaconda, baloney pony, bald-headed hermit, banana, bird, birdie, bobby, boonga

5. An fast-flowing unsupported flow of lava escaping from a solid rockface.