Twitter is all set to sell users’ old tweets to marketing companies DataSift Inc and Gnip Inc. The company agreed to provide tweets that are from 2 years ago to DataSift Inc and tweets that are a month old to Gnip Inc.
Twitter decided to open its tweet archives for these companies to mine data for any valuable information. DataSift Inc will set up a cloud service and let other companies use the service to go through and use some important marketing information. DataSift Inc has agreed to share a part of the revenue it earns from this, with Twitter.
DataSift Inc’s Rob Bailey, in an interview said, “More than 700 companies are on the wait list to try out our offering”. The users who buy this data will be able to analyze the data based on location or based on topics and themes.
Gnip Inc thinks that the data can be used for more than just marketing such as – to help with rescue operations during natural disasters, to monitor illnesses such as a flu outbreak, and to analyze stock market sentiments.
However, DataSift or Gnip Inc do not have access to any deleted tweets. So if you have tweets that you don’t want to share with these companies, you can delete them. DataSift will update its service by removing your deleted tweets.More information on this latest development can be found in an an article by Reuters.