Twitter is currently being sued by PeopleBrowsr, a company that has had full access to Twitter’s firehose, after Twitter said it would restrict PeopleBrowsr’s access to the firehose following the expiration of a previous contract. From Twitter’s perspective, it makes sense to consolidate who is accessing and re-distributing that data due to the scope of the data and work involved in transmitting those tweets. But it hasn’t always been this way, and PeopleBrowsr is challenging Twitter’s earlier commitment to openness when it comes to that firehose of data.

In 2010, Twitter licensed its full firehose to both big guys like Bing, Microsoft, and Google, as well as several startups focused on realtime search, with then-Twitter spokesman Sean Garrett explaining that they wanted to build partnerships that were “sustainable and scalable.”

With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today. In fact, we’re pretty sure that some amazing innovation is possible. Today, we’re happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery. We are thrilled to announce that Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search join us as partners. These companies range from funded startups to part-time, one-person operations so we came up with a fair way to license access that scales with their business. If you think there may be a potential partnership involving access to the Firehose, let’s start a conversation.

Clearly, that conversation about access to the firehose has changed since 2010. A highly-public partnership with Google broke down, killing Google’s realtime search product that relied on the firehose of data. Twitter and Bing re-negotiated their terms in 2010, with AllThingsD reporting at the time that Twitter was asking about $30 million for the access. And most of the startups who recieved access in 2010 are no longer powering search engines: Ellerdale was acquired by Flipboard in July 2010, Collecta has removed their “customer-facing site,” Kosmix was acquired by WalMart in April 2011, Scoopler shut down after the team was acquired by Google to work on Google+ in 2011, and CrowdEye shut down after the founders said they were unable to build a profitable business.

So who’s still has access and distribution rights to the firehose? The full list of companies with commercial partnerships isn’t publicly available, but there are a few like Bing and Salesforce that have publicized this relationship, and several companies listed as part of Twitter’s certified program do have firehose access and can provide enterprise access to that data for other companies who are interested. Duncan Greatwood, CEO of Topsy, which is one of the companies licensed to re-distribute the data, said that including Topsy’s archives, there are now more than 250 billion tweets. That makes it unrealistic, in his opinion, that many companies would be prepared to access the full stream — most companies only access smaller percentages.

But PeopleBrowsr CEO Jodee Rich said his company relies on full access to the firehose to serve its customers, and an agreement with one of the other providers wouldn’t make sense.

“The nature of those agreements are so short-term that no one could possibly build a viable business on those agreements,” he said in an interview. In Rich’s legal statement, which is available online here, he notes that PeopleBrowsr was paying Twitter more than $1 million per year for firehose access.

Topsy, Gnip and DataSift are three providers who license the full firehose of data from Twitter and then re-sell portions of it to either developers building products with the data (showing your influence on Twitter, for instance), or to marketers and brands using sections of tweets to track conversations and trends on the network. PeopleBrowsr is arguing in the court documents that being forced to get data from one of these companies would compromise its ability to serve its clients, since it previously had full access. Twitter counters that it’s totally within its rights to change the terms given that its initial contract with PeopleBrowsr has run its course:

But as Twitter has grown, its contracting practices have matured. Where it once contracted directly with just a handful of data customers like PeopleBrowsr, it now has hundreds of data customers. In order to handle that broad commercial demand in a consistent and transparent manner Twitter has created channel resyndication partnerships with Gnip, DataSift, and Topsy. PeopleBrowsr is free to contract with any of them, just as its competitors do. What it is not free to do is insist that Twitter preserve forever its earlier business model, or continue to be bound by a contract that expired more than a year ago.

A Twitter spokesperson replied that, “We believe the case is without merit and will vigorously defend against it.”

PeopleBrowsr has won a restraining order that forces Twitter to continue firehose access for the time being. As we’ve learned this year, building your company on top of another company’s data is so inherently risky. But the lawsuit does demonstrate the value Twitter’s data has grown to hold, and the lengths companies will go to secure it.

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Under the new alliance, Kaggle’s community of big data eggheads can use Greenplum’s Chorus big data application to solve real-world problems.

“We’ve had good adoption of Chorus and companies’ internal data workers are using it to do data science so they now have the tools, but honestly they don’t have all the people they need,” said Josh Klahr,  VP of product management for Greenplum. “Now you can search the Kaggle community based on rank, expertise, location and invite them to work on your challenge using Greenplum Chorus.”

Playing Yenta to big data players

Kaggle ranks its participants much the way the USTA ranks tennis players. And that community is growing fast — when Kaggle started fundraising in August, there were 11,000 members, now there are close to 60,000, said Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, who said this is the first such vendor partnership Kaggle has done. (GigaOM has worked with Kaggle and Splunk on the GigaOM WordPress Challenge: Splunk Innovation Prospect.)

Also on the partner ecosystem front, Greenplum inked a deal that gives Chorus users access to Gnip’s historical Twitter feeds and will let Chorus users import Twitter streams into their Chorus sandbox for analysis. And finally, Chorus is partnering with Tableau, the popular analytics tool so that users can provision Tableau workbooks from their Chorus data sources.

Big data is one area where building a broad ecosystem of data providers is incredibly important. Putting good data scientists together with great data sets is incredibly important, said Ben Woo, managing director of research firm Neuralytics. “Big data is awfully short on the kinds of people who’ve done this work before and, frankly, people who give a damn. This sort of matchmaking is valuable.”

Goal: Melding public and private data to spark new insights

This convergence of publicly available “sentiment” data from sources like Twitter and internal business data lets data scientists ask interesting questions or find interesting questions to ask. For example, a pharmaceutical company has lots of its own data on a new drug. What it may not have is the sort of information about unforeseen side effects that might surface on Twitter or blogs after the drug is released.  ”If you can match Twitter feeds and patient forums, you can find out unexpected things — see that maybe people are switching from your drug to another. Analyzing that discussion can be incredibly important,”  Goldbloom said.

In related news, Greenplum, as promised last spring, is open sourcing Chorus as the OpenChorus Project under the Apache 2.0 license.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Krejci

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Early this year,a Gartner analyst predicted that CMOs will have bigger IT budget power than CIOs by 2017. Naturally, that analysis was quickly bandied about by CMOs.

But last week, in a blog post unambiguously titled “Marketing is Dead,” Bill Lee wrote that CMOs, as a species, are under fire.

Lee, president of the Lee Consulting Group which focuses on “customer engagement,” cited data from a 2011 Fournaise Marketing Group study suggesting that CEOs don’t see ROI on marketing efforts and are sick of being asked for marketing money with no discernible payoff. On top of that,  Lee posits that shoppers don’t pay attention to traditional marketing anymore. Ouch.

Cloud and big data reshape the marketing role

Underlying this seeming contradiction is that marketing is being redefined in the era of cloud-delivered, self-service applications and services and web-connected consumers. Several CIOs and CTOs have told me that they agree that CMOs gaining clout in their businesses — but the most successful CMOs are those who “get” that effective marketing is both broader and more focused than it’s been in the past.

“Broader” here means that the channels are no longer limited to radio, TV, print and online publications but social networks as well. CMOs who understand that the data flowing in via Twitter and Facebook is an important source of market intelligence — a big data feed that must be monitored and tapped.

Filtering the social networks

The explosion of social networking use means that “multi-channel” marketing is more multi-channel than ever. You don’t have to just track newspaper, TV and radio “thought leaders,” you need to watch for your company’s own thought leaders — your best customers and what they’re saying. That means narrower, less scattershot messaging — why hit up people who are not even remotely interested in your product or service? The idea is that your thought leaders will convince others that your offering is worth a look.

At the very least, you’d better know Gnip and DataSift.

Lee wrote:

Many firms spend lots of resources pursuing outside influencers who’ve gained following on the Web and through social media. A better approach is to find and cultivate customer influencers and give them something great to talk about.

There’s more insight here in a blog post by Evangelos Simoudis, senior managing director of Trident Capital. Simoudis wrote:

In order to become customer-centric and deliver a consistent message to each individual regardless of the communication channel, companies must first integrate all their customer- and prospect-related data.  Up to now, organizations would silo the various types of customer-related data.

So whether a given CMO has clout or is about to get pink-slipped depends a lot on her ability to understand the importance of this data trove and capture and make use of that big data resource.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user lznogood

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Aaron Amat

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That money comes as a follow-on to the $6 million already raised in a Series A round last summer, and $1.5 million in seed funding.  The new cash will be used for product development and to hire more engineers, customer service and sales reps, the company said. DataSift, which launched in the U.K. in 2010, opened a San Francisco office early this year.
DataSift and Gnip are the only companies authorized by Twitter to funnel and parse the Twitter firehose of social media data — information that many companies see as critical for planning service, promotion and marketing campaigns and then gauging their success (or lack thereof).

Companies from consumer electronics manufacturers to fast food chains all watch the Twitter feed — as well as Facebook, blogs, YouTube and other social network sources — collecting data that they then analyze along with their own internal metrics to see how online (or in-store) promotions are working. In early April, DataSift said it was also integrating with Newscred so that customers could study how news and perceptions spread in the media.

In a statement, DataSift CEO Robert Bailey said the company had not been actively seeking new financing but that GRP and IA Ventures came forward with this offer. The fact that they stepped up helps eliminate distraction that comes with raising new funding, he added.

Expect DataSift to use its a some of this money to add new data sources and services, as it and Gnip try to one-up each other. In February, DataSift announced its ability to sort through two years into Twitter data — Gnip can only go back 30 days. In mid April, Gnip announced an exclusive partnership with Tumblr, the fast-growing blogging site. It seems that arms race is bound to continue.

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Gnip is best known as being one of two companies with full access to the Twitter firehose, but Twitter is actually just one of dozens of sources of Gnip’s data. “Although Twitter is obviously an incredibly valuable source of data, it’s just one conversation that’s happening,” Gnip COO Chris Moody told me during a recent call. Indeed.

According to Gnip, Sina Weibo has more than 300 million users, including Chinese celebrities, politicians and executives. International brands such as Nike, Starbucks and Adidas already have a strong presence on the platform, as well. Now, Gnip’s customers, primarily marketing-software companies that combine to serve more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500, can get a view into what Sina Weibo users are talking about, too.

Yes, the web, like the world, is wide, and international companies care about users outside the United States. Sina Weibo is Gnip’s first wholly international data source, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see it eventually add any of the other regional social media platforms that give Facebook and Twitter a run for their money among the local populations.

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With an estimated 250 million tweets posted daily, Twitter is a huge trove of data about things as mundane as celebrity wardrobe malfunctions or as weighty as rebellions in the Middle East. What some have called the “Twitter firehose” – DataSift says there were 250 billion tweets in 2010 — can be an invaluable information source, provided the right data can be found and filtered. That’s what DataSift brings to the table.

The company will say more about that other gold mine of information — Facebook — and how it can tap into that in a few weeks, a spokeswoman said.

DataSift’s current service handles only very recent tweets. Gnip, the only other company Twitter has authorized to work with its data, can go back 30 days; DataSift Historics will dial back to Jan. 2010.

While some might question how valuable months- or years-old information really is, DataSift CEO Rob Bailey said companies planning new products, promotions or price changes would do well to study the impact of their past actions before proceeding and that Twitter is the perfect venue for that.

“Companies spend a lot of money designing new products and social network reaction can be a huge accelerant or a countervailing force,” he said.

A phone maker working on a new model would be well served to go back to see what customers thought of its last release — what they liked and didn’t like about the screen size, resolution and features, for example. If a price change is under consideration, a smart company might go back to see how past price actions were positioned and received.

In addition, it is helpful for businesses to know which Twitter users have the most influence and followers and to study their tweets carefully.

Bailey said DataSift works closely with Twitter to make sure the data is handled properly. “Users are extremely sensitive to privacy so we spent four to five months checking out the data . . . if people have deleted tweets, we make sure they stay deleted,” Bailey said.

DataSift Historics will be broadly available in April.

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Exclusive.

Gnip is now the first company authorized to resell firehose access to the public data from WordPress.com, the comment platform IntenseDebate, and WordPress.org sites that have opted into the Jetpack plugin. Gnip has had a relationship with WordPress for some time, but this partnership will give Gnip a 70-percent increase in its coverage of blog posts and comments through the popular WordPress service, which now powers more than 60 million blogs worldwide.

Twitter brings news, but WordPress has analysis

The Boulder, Colo.-based Gnip is probably best known as the first company authorized to resell access to Twitter’s data firehose back in November 2010, but Gnip currently provides access to some 30 different sources including Facebook, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Vimeo, and others. In fact, today Gnip works with hundreds of customers, such as Radian6, that are collectively serving social media data to over 90 percent of the Fortune 500.

Also, the difference between Twitter data and WordPress data is significant for businesses, Gnip President and COO Chris Moody said in a recent interview. “News breaks on Twitter, but you’re not getting deep sentiment analysis with the data there. That comes with blogs, like what WordPress powers,” he said. “Twitter’s a great initial signal but WordPress blogs give you better sentiment. Companies tracking what’s going on in social media need the full picture.”

The expansion of the WordPress deal is just the first in many new partnership deals Gnip has on deck for 2012, as the company fields more demand for social media content. “We’re effectively doubling down with WordPress and bringing some new data to the market,” Moody said. “Twitter opening up its firehose to us has really had a domino effect in the world of publishers, and now other publishers have noted that it’s important for businesses to have access to this data.”

Competition at the Twitter firehose

There’s another big reason it makes sense for Gnip to expand its other content sources: It has competition on the Twitter front. DataSift, the only other company authorized to provide access to Twitter firehose data, launched in the U.S. in Nov. 2011. Not surprisingly, though, Moody maintains Gnip has not been “paying attention” to DataSift’s growth, as it’s been “so focused on our own business.”

The thing is, that line is actually somewhat believable in Gnip’s case, as the booming demand for social media data is keeping the company quite busy. It now has 33 people, more than triple its size from just a year ago, Moody said. Meanwhile, the company has not taken on outside funding since Nov. 2010; its total VC investment is around $6.5 million.

One thing is certain: Better access to more data is good for both brands and the social media companies that host the conversations about them. It’ll be exciting to see what else Gnip and other companies in the space have on deck for the months ahead.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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We’ve been trying to help our customers answer the “which data” question for the last couple of years by providing anecdotal insights via examples we’ve seen across the industry. Although this approach has provided reasonable guidance, we’ve recognized for a while that there was an opportunity to take a more systematic, research-based approach to answering the question. This summer, we hired a Data Scientist to help us analyze and understand the data needs across various business use cases. The early results suggest that there are at least two key attributes that play a role in answering the “which data” question — reaction time and depth.

Reaction time

From the launch of the next gadget to the death of Osama Bin Laden, significant portions of social conversations are based around events. By analyzing social conversations around specific events, results quickly emerge illustrating that some social networks have faster reaction times to events than others.  For example, we looked at the social conversations happening around Netflix on October 25^th, which was the day after Netflix announced their most recent earnings.

As you would probably guess, Twitter reacted quickly to the news that Netflix opened down significantly. You can see from the chart that peak Twitter conversation happened within moments of the market opening and quickly trailed off.  Studying other conversational data sources such as WordPress it is clear that the overall reaction time was slower as compared to Twitter and the area of the conversation curve was much greater.  As you would expect, the reaction time for blog comments from WordPress significantly trailed the blogs themselves. It is interesting to note that peak Twitter activity corresponded to the opening bell where WordPress comments peaked well after the market closed.  I’m highlighting a very compressed event here, but we’ve studied enough events to see that these curves hold for slower developing events too such as political elections.

One other aspect of social sources as they relate to reaction times is whether an event was an expected event or an unexpected event.  The reaction time curves behave differently between a hurricane (expected natural disaster) and an earthquake (unexpected natural disaster), but I’ll have to save the details of this for a future blog post.

Depth

The amount of content that can be analyzed for insights across public social conversations varies significantly by source.  One of the key benefits of a source like Twitter is that the reaction times are fast which is great for business use cases requiring early signal detection.  However, the amount of content you can analyze for deeper insights on a single tweet payload itself is relatively concise.   On the flip side, sources like blogs, forums, and videos are more likely to be rich in opinion, sentiment, and engagement. In our Netflix example, Tweets such as “NFLX gaps down 35% on open!” tell you what happened, while blog posts like “How Netflix Lost 800,000 Members, and Good Will” have the deeper analysis to tell you why something happened.  Measuring depth is non-trivial, but there are lots of ways to get a feel for the depth of a network.  For example, one simple way to get a reasonable level of accuracy is to just look at the byte size of the various social activities.  Another way to gauge depth is to look at the area under the reaction time curve.  The bigger the area, the more likely you are to get a wide range of views and perspectives.

Mixing the perfect social cocktail

Which public social data is best for performing business analysis and decision-making?  The answer: it depends upon the business use case.

PR crisis management is typically very dependent on ultra fast reaction times so a source like Twitter can be great for early signal detection of a potential problem.  The same company might also be analyzing different public social conversations to inform their product development roadmap.   Millisecond reaction time for product development use cases isn’t typically a necessity.  In fact, a company may prefer in-depth analysis of historical conversation data over realtime conversations in order to make decisions about future products.  A far more important component for product development is the insight that can be gained from analyzing deep social conversations, opinions, etc.  One thing is clear from our early exploration; very few business use cases can be served completely by a single source of public social data.

Lots more work to do

This is just the beginning.  We are continuing to explore the role of different social data sources across different use cases.  Reaction time and depth are two important components, but we also recognize there are plenty of other variables to consider.  As we discover more we will continue to share our findings.  Our goal is to help businesses understand the appropriate social cocktail for the use cases they need to support.  Stay tuned …

Chris Moody is the President and COO at Gnip, a realtime social media data delivery company. He serves on the National Technical Advisory Board of Year Up, is an advisor to several technology startups, and is an active TechStars mentor.

Disclosure: WordPress.com is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Image courtesy of Flickr user aoife mac.

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The idea of a stream of constantly changing real-time information wasn’t invented by Twitter, but it’s probably one of the closest approximations of that idea for many users. To some extent, the appeal is the same as any stream: to watch it flow by, to step into it now and then. But there’s also a lot of potential value in that stream if you could capture it and analyze it, and that ‘s where a number of startups and services are focusing their gaze, including ThinkUp — which just launched a 1.0 version — and DataSift, which also just launched. And Gnip plans to sell data from the Twitter firehose to analysts and traders who want to tap into the zeitgeist of the Twitter-sphere.

ThinkUp is an app designed by former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani, and comes from Expert Labs, the non-profit technology incubator and advisory group run by Anil Dash that has helped the Obama administration (among others) figure out how to use digital technology for social purposes (Dash also runs a consulting firm called Activate media). When installed by an individual user or company, it takes in data from Twitter accounts — as well as Facebook pages and Google+ accounts — then makes it easy to see patterns or to analyze the effectiveness of certain tweets or updates.

ThinkUp tracks and analyzes, but also archives

I’ve been using the app for several months now, and it’s quite fascinating to see the amount of data available. (You can see some of my data here if you are interested.) The dashboard shows the most retweeted content, the times of day when tweets get the most activity, the individual users who respond most, and provides all kinds of charts and graphs for presenting that information visually. For me it’s mostly curiosity, but if you’re running a corporate account, I can see how this kind of data would be hugely useful (the White House has been using it for some time) — and you can export and even embed it easily, since ThinkUp has an open API.

Although the information and insights are important, both Dash and Trapani also mentioned another potential benefit of ThinkUp: It acts as an ongoing archive of all your content, whether it’s tweets or retweets or status updates or even photos and videos. As Dash points out, with any content you upload to a social network of some kind, there’s a very real risk it will one day disappear. And while Facebook and Google let you download your data, Twitter doesn’t provide any way of getting tweets you might have posted in the past. The company’s search only goes back about a week, and even services like Topsy are less than perfect if you want to find a specific message. Says Dash:

The companies behind these networks can, and someday will, destroy all of those moments. Delete them from the record. Forever. With no advance notice… history shows us that it happens. Over and over and over. The clips uploaded to Google Videos, the sites published to Geocities, the entire relationships that began and ended on Friendster: They’re all gone.

In addition to the archiving aspect, however, the really powerful feature that services like ThinkUp can offer is the ability to spot patterns in your Twitter or other social-networking activity. Looking at this data over time could help identify all kinds of different things, particularly for corporate users — what content produced a response and when, who the influencers with respect to your content are. (In what seems to be a veiled reference to Klout’s ranking of users, Dash also said ThinkUp “does not, and will never display some arbitrary score to your profile.”)

DataSift and Gnip also filter and resell the firehose

That’s also the idea behind more ambitious data-filtering services such as DataSift, which was started by British programmer Nick Halstead, which got access to the Twitter firehose as part of a deal with Twitter when it took over the retweet button he created as part of his startup Tweetmeme. DataSift uses semantic filtering to detect patterns in the Twitter stream and is aiming its service at corporations and brands that want to see what kind of reaction their content is getting in social networks (DataSift currently filters just Twitter, but plans to add Facebook and Google+). DataSift launched on Thursday, and is backed by GRP Partners and IA Ventures.

The other company that has access to the full Twitter firehose of data is Gnip, which signed a deal with Twitter to resell that data to companies last year. And Gnip on Thursday announced a partnership with StockTwits (see disclosure below) to provide a feed of both Twitter data and related information from the StockTwits investment community to traders and venture funds who are trying to find patterns in that social activity around stocks or companies. At least one hedge fund has an entire trading strategy that is based on an analysis of Twitter and sentiment related to stocks and the markets.

Not that long ago, Twitter was seen as mostly a social plaything, but as it has become a crucial player in everything from the revolutions of the Arab Spring to the planning and scheduling of television events like the Oscars, it has become more obvious that there is value in that stream, provided you have the right filters.

Disclosure: StockTwits is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Luc Legay

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