Yesterday, Twitter announced its
Certified Partners Program. There are currently
12 partners in the program, and they specialize in one of three categories: engagement, analytics, and data resellers. Twitter says that the certifications will “make it easier for businesses to find the right tools.”
As a privacy company, we sat up when we heard the words “data reseller.” Three of the 12 partner companies–Topsy, DataSift, and Gnip–are data resellers, which means they provide access to all publicly available tweet content over several years (what Twitter calls the “
Firehose“).
Before data resellers like these existed, your old tweets–even public ones–would become buried as you continued to pile new ones on top of them. They’d be
inaccessible after 30 days. Now, companies like DataSift have unlocked this previously inaccessible archive of every Tweet ever made in the past several years. The company collects about
250 million tweets every day, analyzing the things people talk about, the words they use, their geographic location, and even whether their tone seems negative or positive.
