Company plans to make content generated by users available to commerce, academia and even police involved in crowd control
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/18/twitter-puts-trillions-tweets-for-sale-data-miners
You are travelling by plane to see your newborn grandchild. As you board the aircraft, the cabin crew address you by name and congratulate you on the arrival of a bouncing baby boy. On your seat, you find a gift-wrapped blue rattle with a note from the airline.
In Twitter data strategy chief Chris Moody’s vision of the future, companies surprising their customers like this could become an everyday occurrence – made possible because Twitter is listening.
Computer systems are already aggregating trillions of tweets from the microblogging site, sorting and sifting through countless conversations, following the banter and blustering, ideas and opinions of its 288 million users in search of commercial opportunities.
It is not only commercial interests that are mining the data. Academics are using it to gauge the mood in a football crowd, and trying to shed light on whether Premier League players such as Manchester United’s Radamel Falcao are overpaid – with a team of researchers from Reading, Dundee and Cambridge universities testing whether top-flight footballers’ salaries are related purely to performance on the pitch or can be boosted by popularity on social media.
Selling data is as yet a small part of Twitter’s overall income – $70m out of a total of $1.3bn last year, with the lion’s share of cash coming from advertising, but the social network has big plans to increase that. Its acquisition of Chris Moody’s paralytics company Gnip for $130m last April is a sign of that intent.
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