Twitter to bring data business in-house

Data resellers such as DataSift and NTT have historically been able to resell Twitter’s firehose of tweets, but according to a story on recode.net, that access will now be cut off.

“Twitter has seriously damaged the ecosystem this week. 80% of our customers use technology that can’t be replaced by Twitter,” said Nick Halstead, founder and CEO of DataSift in a blog on the company’s website. “At the end of the day, Twitter is providing data licensing, not processing data to enable analysis.

“Twitter also demonstrated that it doesn’t understand the basic rules of this market: social networks make money from engagement and advertising. Revenue from data should be a secondary concern to distribution and it should occur only in a privacy-safe way.”

DataSift has recently announced that it is working alongside Facebook on a new analytics product: topic data. Its Twitter data access will expire on August 13, 2015.