• DataSift To Offer Access To Historical Tweets

    Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

    historics-icon
    historics-icon

    Twitter developers have long been pining for access to historical Tweets. Right now, the best they can get is 7 days worth based on keyword search. DataSift, one of Twitter’s data partners which currently provides developers and third parties with access to the full Twitter firehose in realtime, will soon make historical Tweets accessible as well. Developers can sign up for the Alpha of DataSift’s Historical Data starting today (the actual service will begin to roll out in the first quarter of next year).

    DataSift’s Historical service will give developers, social media monitoring companies, marketers, and brands access to 60 days of tweets for the Alpha, which can be analyzed and filtered beyond simple keyword search. When the service is launched more broadly later next year, it will go back as far as two years. DataSift allows for all sorts of data analysis because it pours all the tweets into a structured database. So you can give it queries like: “Give me all the tweets that mention TechCrunch from people who do not follow @techcrunch” or “All females in the UK who mention fashion.”

    The company is already collecting the 1 terabyte per day of data internally—that is how much is produced by the firehose of 250 million tweets a day— with 400 terabytes total so far. “This is a real ‘big data’ engine—and that we are making it simple—we are taking advantage of map reduce—but this is our own bespoke processing engine,” says DataSift founder Nick Halstead, referring to the Hadoop technology the service is partially based on.


    Company: DataSift
    Website: datasift.com
    Launch Date: August 2010
    Funding: $14.7M

    DataSift is the social-data platform company, enabling enterprises and entrepreneurs to mine the social web for insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and millions of blogs and forums. As a licensed Twitter resyndication partner, DataSift gulps down and analyses data across the social-web, enabling companies to create powerful filters to listen for social-signals about brands, breaking news, and public opinion. Delivered as a cloud-platform, DataSift does the heavy-lifting for companies creating social-media monitoring,...

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    Company: Twitter
    Website: twitter.com
    Launch Date: March 21, 2006
    Funding: $1.16B

    Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

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