-->Researchers and companies who want to track the conversations going on online are intensely interested in data from Twitter. It's been hard to get deep access to that information, however. Onstage today at Defrag, a Web conference in Denver, Colorado, Twitter announced that it's formed a partnership to make more of its data available for analysis.
Ryan Sarver, a member of Twitter's platform team, said that the move is aimed at helping people who are analyzing huge bodies of Twitter posts in order to perform sentiment analysis, identify trends, and other sorts of data-intensive tasks. "We haven't been able to serve that market well in the past," Sarver said.
Twitter already let people pick up portions of its data for free through several partial feeds, such as the Spritzer, which skims a portion of the posts moving through Twitter at any given moment and passes them on. Before today's announcement, however, those wanting more had to make deals with Twitter to get more data. Google and Bing, for example, made special agreements to incorporate real-time feeds from Twitter on its search results page.
That data hasn't been readily available for several reasons. First, it's valuable and makes up some portion of Twitter's business model. Second, Twitter already struggles with overload and wouldn't be able to handle constant requests for its full feed.
Twitter will open up more of its data through a partnership with Gnip, a social data company based in Boulder, Colorado. Gnip will help Twitter distribute the information, minimizing the stress that this places on Twitter's resources. Twitter is also granting Gnip a license to sell the data.
Gnip is starting out by offering three new feeds: the Twitter halfhose, which gives 50 percent of the full Twitter firehose, the Twitter Decahose, which is 10 percent of the full Twitter stream, and the Mentionhose, which is a full real-time stream of all tweets mentioning a user, including replies and retweets.
"We will provide more transparent, consistent access to Twitter data than has ever been available before," said Gnip CEO Jud Valeski. He says that all of these new offerings give much more data than was previously available to most people. He expects the Mentionhose to be particularly interesting to companies tracking trends, looking for influential people on Twitter, and monitoring engagement with a product.
Valeski said, "There is insatiable demand for lots of data to understand how conversations online are taking place and transpiring."
E-mail Print Favorite Share![]()
![]()
Great notes from the MIT Startup Bootcamp posted by Ali Powell. I've excerpted the first set from David Cancel of Performable.
'Creating a data driven startup.
Timing is everything.
Marketing, big data, analytics.
"98 percent of the people that come to your website leave and they never come back."
3 lessons learned the hard way:
1. The middle sucks. Don't be in the middle. That is the valley of death.
2. Your "demo" is useless. No one cares about your demo. Why would you spend energy on a demo when you could be creating the real product?
3. So is your business plan. Your business plan is wrong and worthless. It will not be the same at day 1 as it is along the way and at the end.
You do not want to hear, "that is interesting." That means that the investor does not care about your product.
Your biggest challenge is making people care. Don't focus on competitors. Stop reading Techcrunch.
Sell a dream or sell traction. Don't try to sell in the middle, don't sell the demo.
Your idea doesn't matter. It is about finding a pain point, solving a critical problem.
As soon as you hear "IF"- warning sign for your product.
If it is cheaper, if it was easier, etc...
Make sure that people will care about your product and want to start using it.
The Secret= #JFDI- Just Fu*king Do It!
Stop reading- Do something.
DOES ANYBODY CARE ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT?
"You are solving to make somebody care. There are NO repeatable patterns for startup success. Stop looking for one."'
Also speaking were:
Ric Fulop of A123Systems
Kevin Hale of Wufoo
Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research
Alexis Ohanian of reddit
James Lindenbaum of Heroku
Bob MetCalfe of Polaris Ventures
George Bell of General Catalyst Partners
Ayr Muir of Clover Food Lab
Mick Mountz of Kiva Systems
Chris Wanstrath of github
Read the full post:
http://www.bostonwomenpreneurs.com/boston-womenpreneurs-blog/bid/44597/Startu...
James Lindenbaum (Heroku) - Be a Machete
Heroku is a beast of a company with a ton of users and a large number of paying customers as well. When looking at the live stat counter I think it caught James off guard as it increases so much everyday he didn't know what the exact number was. Very candid and very inspiring moment.
What is a machete?
A machete is a simple straight forward tool that allows you to accomplish and be many things while staying simple. The same could be achieved with a swiss army knife, but that's bloated and really 50 things crammed into one. A machete is really one thing that can serve AS 50 things. What can you discover from your product and through customer development?
Throwing Things Away
In order to be a machete, you have to be ultra lean and able to stay simple. In order to do this, you need to be able to throw things away that aren't necessary to your customers. Don't have too much emotional attachment to a product or feature.
Excerpt rom post:
On Saturday, MIT hosted Startup Bootcamp to provide a diverse group of lessons to hopeful founders and those teetering on the edge of jumping into a startup. The tagline for the event was actually "Starting a company is easier than you think." The videos will be online soon as well if you want to relive the experience. I thought it would be useful to sum up the important lessons from each talk instead of doing a direct play by play.
You can also check out more coverage at:
1) Startup Bootcamp Take Aways
2) Why I'm Going To Get A Dog, Lose My Ego, And Just F'Ing Do It"