For the first time ever, researchers will now be able to access extensive historical Twitter data. Previously, only the preceding 30 days of tweets were available for companies to search. The new move means that trend analysts and companies looking for specific insight will now be able to access tweets dating back two years.

Twitter has partnered with UK-based Datasift to offer the archive service to companies wanting to plan marketing campaigns, target influential users, or even attempt to predict certain events and trends.

It said that it would make data available that dated back to January 2010.

Datasift’s marketing manager, Tim Barker:

No-one’s ever done this before. It’s a brand new service that we’re bringing online – it’s a massive technology challenge because of the amount of data that is pumped out every single day.

Unsurprisingly, Datasift claimed they’d already seen a large demand for the product – with nearly 1 000 companies joining a waiting list to access the service.

Barker said, that on average, 250 million tweets would be analysed every 24 hours, irrespective of them being directed in a positive or negative manner.

On top of this, software would also log location data and social media influence based in part on the existing influence monitoring service, Klout.

Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, expressed obvious concerns about the new service:

People have historically used Twitter to communicate with friends and networks in the belief that their tweets will quickly disappear into the ether.

The fact that two years’ worth of tweets can now be mined for information and the resulting ‘insights’ sold to businesses is a radical shift in the wrong direction.

Twitter has turned a social network that was meant to promote real-time global conversation into a vast market-research enterprise with unwilling, unpaid participants.

There is this saving grace however: private accounts, and tweets that have been deleted, will not be indexed.

Barker countered Hosein’s concerns about the technology, and argued that people used Twitter because of its public nature:

The thing with Twitter is that it was always created to be a public social network – which isn’t the case with Facebook which is more of a blended model. Twitter has been public from day one.

I don’t see that this creates any new dilemmas because this information is being pushed out socially right now. What Datasift will do is help companies get a longer view of this and a better insight.

Twitter has battled to find revenue streams that worked for the social media giant, but it will now earn money from Datasift as part of licensing fee agreements.

Ben Page, chief executive of research firm Ipsos-Mori, didn’t feel the new service would be “game-changing”, but couldn’t deny the fact that any tool that claimed to offer insight into the complex world of consumer behaviour would be welcomed by businesses.

It will help the [businesses] who are trying to deal with consumers via social media target their activities a bit more. Whether they admit it or not, companies will use that.

The service is also predicted to offer further understanding into mass social phenomena such as the Arab Spring, and other related socially influenced events.

[Source: BBC]