Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Gnip Will Be First Authorized Reseller of Historical Twitter Data

Social media is all about real-time conversation in the present, but people seem to have finally started remembering that there’s a value to the past.

On the consumer side, there are things like Facebook Timeline and the clever Timehop emails. On the business side, Gnip said it will now be the first official vendor of historical Twitter data feeds.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves; by “historical,” Gnip means the past 30 days. Most of Twitter’s history is still locked in the vault.

A month’s worth of older tweets will help Gnip customers, which include many social media monitoring companies, help their own clients search through tweets they may have missed because they didn’t know to look for something at the time or because they had a technical problem gathering and processing data.

Gnip COO Chris Moody estimated at least 80 percent of Gnip customers will opt to get historical tweets. He said access to the old tweets would be included in existing products, so it would be hard to break out how much they will cost.

Gnip was Twitter’s first authorized data reseller — another one is DataSift — while Twitter itself focused on its advertising business.

Moody said Gnip found its way to the historical tweets deal because it is helping with a long-gestating project to get all historical tweets into the U.S. Library of Congress.

That “full historical corpus” is still on the way, held up by technical challenges as well as issues of compliance like honoring deleted tweets, Moody said.

But even when that project comes online, Gnip customers will have to keep paying for Twitter data, Moody said. The Library of Congress archive is explicitly designated for non-commercial purposes.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google