I don't get what you can do with twitter data...
Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#12"Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has erupted as hundreds of companies queue up to purchase users’ personal information from the new database." Is there actually any information in this? What do they mean by believed to be vanished forever? According to the BBC new article [1] "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the si…
Normal people believe that information that is nearly impossibly difficult to find is as good as gone forever. (This is mostly as these same "normal people" also often don't understand that website scraping can be automated; a sad misapplication of almost-reasonable cost heuristics to a system they don't understand.)
However, on Twitter there is an extra wrinkle: neither the site nor the API allow you to go back more than 800 tweets for any view, whether it be "search results matching X" or "tweets that mention me" or "tweets posted by user Y" (the one exception being "your own tweets", where you can go back 3200).
This means that if you tweet a lot, it is impossible for another user to go back very far into your history. Even you may not be able to go back that far in your own history. As an example: if you send 20 tweets a day, your history will be inaccessible to you within 6 months, and inaccessible to other users within 6 weeks.
Given that this information is seemingly just gone--inaccessible, unable to be found from the user interface of any client, or Twitter's website, or searches on Twitter--while you and I know that they didn't delete it (in fact, Twitter even implies as much in their documentation somewhere: that the 800/3200 are only "temporary" limits), normal people are going to consider that data "vanished forever".
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#13"Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has erupted as hundreds of companies queue up to purchase users’ personal information from the new database." Is there actually any information in this? What do they mean by believed to be vanished forever? According to the BBC new article [1] "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the si…
I imagine the "believed to have vanished forever" is based on the common misconception that because Twitter's search only goes back about a week, they don't save older tweets anywhere.
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#14Is there a crowdsourced public archive of tweets? If not, we should build one.
And then sell it to the big corps for 10% less than twitter... excellent idea :)
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#15"privacy betrayed" -> any of this data was ever private. it wasn't.
Unless you opted to have a private profile. I wonder how if those private tweets are included in the bundle. I agree, however: if you want to keep your thoughts private, don't post them on the Internet. When do you do that, they don't belong to you anymore.
> I wonder how if those private tweets are included in the bundle.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022
"private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site"
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#1695% of these tweets are ones with links to "enlarge", "boost", "find a adult partner", "xxx" :))
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you opted to have a private profile. I wonder how if those private tweets are included in the bundle. I agree, however: if you want to keep your thoughts private, don't post them on the Internet. When do you do that, they don't belong to you anymore.
> I wonder how if those private tweets are included in the bundle. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022 "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site"
Thanks! I admit not reading TFA.
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#18I don't get what you can do with twitter data...
Instead of down voting can someone give some examples...
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#19Related: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acq...
Library of Congress already has an archive of public tweets.