Streams are an essential programming construct that facilitate the movement of data between objects and services without manual iteration, making them popular in platforms such as Twitter, NodeJS, Java 8, and RSS feeds. The text discusses how streams can be used in NodeJS to handle real-time data, exemplified by streaming tweets containing specific hashtags into a PubNub channel for purposes like archiving, distribution, or visualization. By subclassing NodeJS's Readable and Writable streams, custom streams such as LogStream and NDJSONOutStream can be created to log tweets to the console or write them to disk in Newline Delimited JSON format. Furthermore, tweets can be streamed into PubNub channels using a PubNubOutStream, which allows for real-time data processing and visualization through platforms like the PubNub Debug Console. This approach highlights the flexibility and power of streams in handling dynamic data flows, with potential future enhancements through integration with PubNub BLOCKS for additional functionality.