Twitter Is Selling Your Old Tweets

This time it's different.

Sure, Twitter sold tweets before - whether you knew it or not - and yes, they own your tweets. But now they are selling 'historical' tweets - those being as ancient as two years ago. Bet you never thought of yourself as a valuable historical relic like your grandparents' house or your dad's sports jersey collection or some of that junk people drag on to TV's 'Antiques Road Show.'

But hey, this is good news. Your tweets have actual value, not for their pithy social commentary,(bummer about that) but for what advertisers and investors might discern from them about buying patterns or intent. So you have become a sort of future like those pork bellies and barrels of oil those screaming maniacs in the Chicago trading pits buy and sell.

Discomfort about privacy violations? It hasn't stopped anyone yet. Convenience uber alles. But it is cool to think that some hedge fund analyst may be puzzling over the meaning of something you sent from a bar at 2AM on a Saturday night you cant even remember. Hopefully she'll make more sense of it than anyone you sent it to did. We predict this trend will be either a fascinating development in enhanced data interpretation - or a sign of the apocalypse. JL

Keith Wagstaff reports in Time:

U.K.-based Datasift is now selling “historical” tweets to advertisers willing to shell out at least $1,000. In this case, “historical” refers to tweets sent out by users as far back as two years ago, which, to be fair, did all occur sometime within the spectrum of human history.

Not that Twitter didn’t make your tweets available to advertisers before. But previously, Twitter let most companies access only the last seven days of activity, and one company — Gnip — access 30 days of archives, according to a previous report by All Things D.
Now companies such as Datasift will be able to search through two years’ worth of tweets, analyze their content and sell that valuable information to different buyers. Twitter ends up getting paid a licensing fee for its troubles.

Who wants your precious tweets from 2010? Advertisers, of course, as well as “hedge funds that are tracking indicators for stocks” and “news organizations analyzing how stories are performing,” according to Forbes.

The question now is whether or not people will feel violated by the move. On one hand, Twitter has always been a much more public social networking site than, say, Facebook. The fact that @Alyssa_Milanohas 1,976,963 followers points to the fact that people — even very famous celebrities — feel much more open about befriending random people and sharing information with them.

Still, the idea of data companies sifting through your digital past for profit might prove distasteful to some. Datasift released a YouTube video explaining how the company analyzes each tweet to determine whether it expresses a positive or negative opinion of something, its location, what topics were mentioned and which links were shared.

Right now, the service is only being offered to a select number of companies as it’s tested, but Datasift says it plans to make it widely available by the end of the year