Gnip Introduces Historical PowerTrack for Twitter
From the post:
Gnip, the largest provider of social data to the world, is launching Historical PowerTrack for Twitter, which makes available every public Tweet since the launch of Twitter in March of 2006.
People use Twitter to connect with and share information on the things they care about. To date, analysts have had incomplete access to historical Tweets. Starting today, companies can now analyze a full six years of discussion around their brands and product launches to better understand the impact of these conversations. Political reporters can compare Tweets around the 2008 Election to the activity we are seeing around this year’s Election. Financial firms can backtest their trading algorithms to model how incorporating Twitter data generates additional signal. Business Intelligence companies can incorporate six years of Tweets into their data offerings so their customers can identify correlation with key business metrics like inventory and revenue.
“We’ve been developing Historical PowerTrack for Twitter for more than a year,” said Chris Moody, President and COO of Gnip. “During our early access phase, we’ve given companies like Esri, Brandwatch, Networked Insights, Union Metrics, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide and others the opportunity to take advantage of this amazing new data. With today’s announcement, we’re making this data fully available to the entire data ecosystem.” (emphasis added)
Can you name one thing that Gnip’s “PowerTrack for Twitter” is not capturing?
Think about it for a minute. I am sure they have all the “text” of tweets, along with whatever metadata was in the stream.
So what is Gnip missing and cannot deliver to you?
In a word, semantics.
The one thing that makes one message valuable and another irrelevant.
Example: In a 1950’s episode of “I Love Lucy,” Lucy says to Ricky over the phone, “There’s a man here making passionate love to me.” Didn’t have the same meaning in the 1950’s as it does now (and Ricky was in on the joke).
A firehose of tweets may be impressive, but so is an open fire plug in the summer.
Without direction (read semantics), the water just runs off into the sewer.