Data management company DataSift announced today that it was opening sign-ups for the alpha program of its Twitter Historical Data project. Users who get alpha access will have access to the entire Twitter stream going back two months. Once the project goes live next year, customers will have access going much farther back.
The project is intended as a tool to aid organizations in marketing their products, observing social media trends, and development. Users will have access to sophisticated filtering and search tools allowing them to glean valuable data on customer sentiment, trends, customer interactions, product reviews, and a variety of topics far back into the Twitter archive. The project represents a significant advance over the simple search tools that were available before.
DataSift is a data processing and management company. The company is one of Twitter’s licensed re-syndicators. As such, they have access to the entire Twitter “firehose,” the 250 million tweets produced each day around the world. The company offers access to the firehose of Tweets, and to complex sifting tools designed to enable customers to derive useful data from it. With this new historical service, they open up access to not only the current firehose, but to their massive archives as well.
There was no information on pricing in DataSift’s press release, however it stands to reason that they will maintain a pricing model similar to their existing services, which offer both pay-as-you-go and subscription options.