Twitter is offering up access to its entire corpus of tweets to a select group of researchers through a new data grant program. But the program raises a simmering question over whether such valuable data shouldn’t be more open in the first place.
Twitter is fast becoming a platform that’s far more valuable for marketers, politicians, traders and journalists than for any given individual user. That’s because if you know how to use it, the breadth of raw data Twitter offers via its firehose can tell a lot of stories.
Following on the heels of Apple buying Topsy, fellow Twitter-specialist DataSift has announced a $42 million round of venture capital financing.
Dataminr, a startup dedicated to analyzing the Twitter firehose of real-time tweets, is using today’s BlackBerry news as proof of its value. The company claims it gave users a 3-minute advantage in which time to start selling BalckBerry shares.
Gnip, one of a handful of companies with direct access to the Twitter firehose, is now letting its customers query 30 days worth of tweets via a new search API. CEO Chris Moody describes it as fast delivery on small data.
The needle-and-haystack analogy of finding important insights inside big data certainly applies to tweets, and Dataminr, one service that find the needles in the Twitter firehose, just got more venture funding.
DataSift raised another $15 million in venture capital, bringing its total investment to nearly $30 million. In this video from Structure: Europe, DataSift Founder and CTO Nick Halstead describes how the company handles the firehose of social media data it receives.
Underneath Twitter’s fun and trendy public image, the data streamed through the microblogging service is apparently worth some big bucks. DataSift, one of only two companies authorized to re-syndicate Twitter’s content using its “firehose,” on Monday announced a $6 million venture capital funding round.
