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Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#32Wait, so this "article" makes a bunch of claims against Twitter based on zero authoritative links and a bunch of unsourced quotes from ... the Daily Mail? And we're supposed to take this seriously? Come on, doesn't it take more than a bunch of unsubstantiated claims for the HN community to jump on something and just take it at face value?
The only thing that annoys me is twitter won't sell my own archive back to me! I'd happily hand over money for that
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#33I wonder how it gets over this [1]. [1] http://tweetcc.com/
Easily.
> By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).
> You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.
> Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.
You can put a CC license on your tweets, and it'll grant those additional copyright rights to anyone, but it doesn't limit what Twitter can do with the content you posted one bit.
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#34Is there a crowdsourced public archive of tweets? If not, we should build one.
Twitter doesn't allow that:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_recent_changes_to_t...
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#35OMG. They'll know everything I ate the past two years!
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#36As long as they don't sell DM's or private account tweets, I don't really see the big issue.. By saying that, I mean I'm comfortable with companies having what was already public in the first place.
If you were publicly tweeting and then went private just before this database was closed off, would those tweets get out?
What if you switched back and forth between private and public a bunch of times? Were those private tweets lost or did they reappear when you went public?
My gut says everything stays in the database and it's all being sold.
Re: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you know the id of a tweet you can still access it I believe. https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show.json?id=20 still works, which allows you to construct https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/20 which also still works. So, it's only searches which don't go that far back.
Right. You can also find a lot of old tweets using Google (which is, of course, hit or miss). As I said, you (a general you of "people on HN", not just the person I responded to) and I know that it isn't deleted. You and I know all sorts of things about websites that the normal person does not, which means we honestly can (and do) come off as if we know deep hacker magic secrets for demonstrating what is, to us, rather obvious things. When we design websites (and privacy policies...) we need to remember this.
Remember: for a normal person, those somewhat scary-looking URLs are likely opaque. To the extent that people spend any time pulling them apart, it turns into a game of "guess the really long number, by hand, typing attempts into the URL bar of their web browser". They are unlikely even to figure out that it is monotonically increasing (which may or may not even help given the volume of the site); and, even if they did, for them the probability of guessing one of those numbers would still be effectively zero.