Why doesn't the Twitter streaming API work with a Python Flask framework?

How are you trying to do this in Flask? A code snippet would be really helpful. I'll give this a shot anyway. Results from Twitter's streaming API are 'pushed' from the server. It's not clear from your question, but you're probably not looking at the problem correctly. Flask responds ONCE to a client request (this is just how HTTP works). One request, one response. This means that it's not a very good fit for a streaming API. The whole point of streaming is real-time, but a web server will only respond to a client when a request is made. You could take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology for a brief overview of some solutions to this problem. Long polling with Flask would be... bad if you're trying to scale in any way at all. Long polling would require that you use something like Tornado (if you have to use Python), but this is where http://nodejs.org would really shine. I mean, just take a look at http://socket.io/. It's like magic!