For years now, companies have been combing through Twitter postings, 
trying to glean any information that may help them improve their 
products and services.
But with more than 250 million tweets sent every day, it would take an enormous staff to analyze the data.
That task gave rise to hundreds of social media-monitoring companies,
 but they were still limited to the tweets that could be accessed by 
individual users.
Twitter, however, has decided to make it easier for these companies 
to mine billions of messages for valuable marketing data. The company 
will open its archives and sell its old tweets.
One of Twitter's new customers, DataSift, has formed an alliance with
 the social network to get access to tweets going back to January 2010.
"Twitter has really become an incredibly valuable information 
source," said Rob Bailey, DataSift's CEO. "There are a flood of 
companies wanting to get more use from it."
Starting next month, DataSift will launch a cloud-based service that 
will allow other companies to analyze these two-plus years of tweets to 
learn more about their customers.
According to its website, DataSift promises customers will be able to "unlock trends from public tweets" and "access the full Twitter firehose."
Users will pay DataSift for only the data it retrieves. DataSift will then share part of the revenue with Twitter.
The company emphasizes it won't have access to deleted tweets or users' direct messages.
Twitter also has partnered with Gnip, a Colorado-based online data-mining company, to license its historical tweets.
Because Twitter is a public forum, privacy watchdogs may face difficulties raising objections.
"We welcome the privacy debate," said Bailey, who is based in San Francisco.
Twitter so far is not commenting publicly about its new partnership.
CNN
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Twitter to sell users' old tweets to marketers
10:30 PM
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