Social data company Gnip, acquired by Twitter last year, has become an indispensable tool for all types of companies. Data, especially social data, is necessary to make decisions on things like timing a product launch or putting together a new marketing campaign.
Until now, companies have been able to pull instant reports using up to 30 days’ worth of historical tweets. Today, through Gnip, Twitter is turning that instant access on for its treasure trove — the full archive. All nine years’ worth of tweets.
I spoke with Adam Tornes, Product Manager from Gnip, and he told me that the Full-Archive Search API is by far the most requested feature from its customers since day one. Sure, Gnip also doles out social data for Facebook, Tumblr and others, but Twitter is the crown jewel.
Tornes also told me that to do these types of historical data pulls in the past it used to take days, and today’s launch addresses that with instant access through the search API. Now that Twitter offers consumers the full archive through search, Tornes says that Gnip can leverage that full indexing and technology for its data partners.
This is going to be really helpful for political candidates who can go back to campaigns run both in 2012 and 2008 to gauge sentiment, learn some forgotten tricks or remind themselves of what not to do.
One of my favorite applications of Gnip is its work with the Library of Congress, preserving tweets for years to come. The other favorite application of this data is predictive modeling. Forecasting probabilities and trends fascinates me and with companies of all shapes and sizes having access to past milestones one tweet at a time, it’ll be almost scary how they can adapt future products to needs we don’t yet know we have.
Data is big business, and Twitter has a lot of it. It made complete sense for the company to acquire Gnip and at the time, the Gnip team promised “faster and deeper” access to tweets. Today, it delivered for its customers.