MOST tweets are inane, but a million may contain valuable information. Fed through clever algorithms, a torrent of microblogs can reveal changes in a nation’s mood. Hence the excitement about a new market: the sale and analysis of real-time social-media data. DataSift, a start-up, will soon launch a marketplace for such information.
Both DataSift and Gnip are striving to be “data platforms”. Both Gnip and DataSift have built robust networks which can cope with massive amounts of data in real time. Buyers are mostly social-media monitoring companies, which analyse the data for a fee. Sysomos, a Canadian firm, for example, allows firms to track in real time what people think about certain products. Lexalytics, for instance, analyses the sentiment of messages and posts. Klout measures the influence of social-media users (some firms give people with a high Klout score preferential treatment).
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