DataSift Unlocks Access To Historical Twitter Data Dating Back To January 2010

DataSift, one of Twitter’s data partners which currently provides developers and third parties with access to the full Twitter firehose in realtime, is about to unlock a whole new set of Twitter data to the ecosystem. The social data platform has launched Historics, a cloud-computing platform that enables entrepreneurs and enterprises to extract business insights from Twitter’s public Tweets dating back to January 2010 (we originally reported on the pending launch here).

Developers, businesses and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data. But what makes DataSift special (besides the premier access to Twitter data) is that it can then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative. As we’ve reported in the past, DataSift does not limit searches based on keywords and allows companies of any size to define extremely complex filters, including location, gender, sentiment, language, and even influence based on Klout score, to provide quick and very specific insight and analysis.

Currently, DataSift is the only company to offer historical Tweets from as far back as two years ago. As AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes reported recently, Gnip was the first authorized reseller of historical data from Twitter, Tweets only went past 30 days (previously developers generally had access to 7 days worth of data).

With DataSift, companies can now tap into both real-time and over two years of historical Tweets to filter and extract insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion.

Basically, DataSift aggregates this public social data, enriches it, filters and delivers this data social media monitoring, business intelligence and CRM applications. DataSift enriches every Tweet with details including sentiment, topics, web-links, location and social media influence so that companies can extract meaning and create insights.

As CEO Rob Bailey explains to us, one example of a use case of the historical data could be a mobile handset company that may want to see how a previous product launch unfolded, who Tweeted about it, from what geographic regions, and which customers were positive vs. negative. Financial organizations can analyze popular sentiment, trends and indicators relating to businesses and economic events and news and research organizations can surface new trends around historic and popular culture events. According to Bailey, demand for Historics is high. Almost a thousand companies – including 100 of the Fortune 500 companies – have already joined the waitlist for Historics.

Founder & CTO Nick Halstead tells us that DataSift’s platform is so powerful that it can process a whole month of Twitter data in an hour. He says that currently DataSift is running over half a petabyte of storage.

In terms of availability, Historics is available today as a limited release to existing customers and is currently scheduled to be generally available in April 2012. The service itself is available as either a corporate subscription or pay-as-you-go service.

Bailey tells us that 2012 is going to be a huge year for the recently launched company, and will be increasing the number of social data sources by a factor of ten. We’ll also see a number of big customer announcements, as well as making the UI of parsing through this social data as easy to use as possible with features like drag and drop functionality.