curl http://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/sample.json -u<user>:<pass> | mongoimport -c twitter_live One thing that you can do with mongo is have 1 streaming master and 1 read/write master server A: ./mongod —master —dbpath /tmp/a server B ./mongod —dbpath /tmp/b —master —slave —source localhost:27017 —port 9999 You can then pipe the stream into server a, and it will only process the live stream. S