7 ms·

Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive

52 points by narad 15y ago

zachinglis 15y ago
Am I the only one not shocked or offended? I post publicly on Twitter. Anyone can do that anyway. … Unless I'm missing something.
- mullethunter 15y ago
  Agreed. I use twitter as my public micro-blogging/rating/raving platform, and for them to sell data that I assumed was already being pulled by anyone via the API is a non issue to me.
- mcdillon 15y ago
  The people who are shocked and offended don't understand that they aren't the user of these "free" social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). They / we are in fact the product and once it's realized that your data is being sold to others than you will change the way you interact with the networks.
- corin_ 15y ago
  The one possible privacy problem that I can see is that they are selling tweets that users can no longer control - if I said something a year ago that I wish I could take back ("Hi everyone, just to let you know I'm gay" or whatever), I'm now unable to delete it, or even review what it was I said, but it can still be sold and tied to me. Still, not something I personally have an issue with, and I suspect not something most people would have an issue with.
- gren 15y ago
  so true. public is public. Anyone could have data mined all these twitts... But the difficult question that may rise is the "right to delete". IMO it's a hard dilemma: history VS privacy. Can someone decide to delete all its trace and destroy everything he built? On the other hand, we need to keep trace of what's happened in the past, don't you think?
revorad 15y ago
Is there a crowdsourced public archive of tweets? If not, we should build one.
- kamjam 15y ago
  And then sell it to the big corps for 10% less than twitter... excellent idea :)
- lignuist 15y ago
  Twitter doesn't allow that: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_recent_changes_to_twitters_terms_of_service_mi.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_recent_changes_to_t...
jond3k 15y ago
"privacy betrayed" -> any of this data was ever private. it wasn't.
- zedr 15y ago
  Unless you opted to have a private profile. I wonder how if those private tweets are included in the bundle. I agree, however: if you want to keep your thoughts private, don't post them on the Internet. When do you do that, they don't belong to you anymore.
  - psquid 15y ago
    > I wonder how if those private tweets are included in the bundle. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022 "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site"
    - zedr 15y ago
      Thanks! I admit not reading TFA.
af3 15y ago
I wonder how it gets over this [1]. [1] http://tweetcc.com/ http://tweetcc.com/
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  Easily. https://twitter.com/tos https://twitter.com/tos > By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). > You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. > Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services. You can put a CC license on your tweets, and it'll grant those additional copyright rights to anyone, but it doesn't limit what Twitter can do with the content you posted one bit.
ajanuary 15y ago
"Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has erupted as hundreds of companies queue up to purchase users’ personal information from the new database." Is there actually any information in this? What do they mean by believed to be vanished forever? According to the BBC new article [1] "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site." Historically Twitter have been pretty good about ensuring, in their licences at least, things like deleted tweets are deleted even from external archives. It's what makes compiling a database of tweets - even for research purposes - quite difficult. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022
- saurik 15y ago
  Normal people believe that information that is nearly impossibly difficult to find is as good as gone forever. (This is mostly as these same "normal people" also often don't understand that website scraping can be automated; a sad misapplication of almost-reasonable cost heuristics to a system they don't understand.) However, on Twitter there is an extra wrinkle: neither the site nor the API allow you to go back more than 800 tweets for any view, whether it be "search results matching X" or "tweets that mention me" or "tweets posted by user Y" (the one exception being "your own tweets", where you can go back 3200). This means that if you tweet a lot, it is impossible for another user to go back very far into your history. Even you may not be able to go back that far in your own history. As an example: if you send 20 tweets a day, your history will be inaccessible to you within 6 months, and inaccessible to other users within 6 weeks. Given that this information is seemingly just gone--inaccessible, unable to be found from the user interface of any client, or Twitter's website, or searches on Twitter--while you and I know that they didn't delete it (in fact, Twitter even implies as much in their documentation somewhere: that the 800/3200 are only "temporary" limits), normal people are going to consider that data "vanished forever".
  - warp 15y ago
    If you know the id of a tweet you can still access it I believe. https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show.json?id=20 https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show.json?id=20 still works, which allows you to construct https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/20 https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/20 which also still works. So, it's only searches which don't go that far back.
dutchbrit 15y ago
As long as they don't sell DM's or private account tweets, I don't really see the big issue.. By saying that, I mean I'm comfortable with companies having what was already public in the first place.
- joezydeco 15y ago
  If you were publicly tweeting and then went private just before this database was closed off, would those tweets get out? What if you switched back and forth between private and public a bunch of times? Were those private tweets lost or did they reappear when you went public? My gut says everything stays in the database and it's all being sold.
suking 15y ago
I don't get what you can do with twitter data...
- suking 15y ago
  Instead of down voting can someone give some examples...
  - gizzlon 15y ago
    Company C launched product P on date D.. did mentions go up? Are tweets about company/topic/place/store positive or negative? What do people tweet about when inside our store?
  - watty 15y ago
    "analyze tweets posted each day for anything said about their products and services."
- fernandose 15y ago
  check out datasift, they recently got covered by the press a couple of days on their tweet analysing platform
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- gtani 15y ago
  TweetReports, Twazzup, Topsy, and Twitscoop. oneRiot was acquired. http://www.pearltrees.com/#/N-f=1_3785314&N-fa=3689915&N-p=29674375&N-play=0&N-s=1_3785314&N-u=1_428880 http://www.pearltrees.com/#/N-f=1_3785314&N-fa=3689915&#...
hippich 15y ago
95% of these tweets are ones with links to "enlarge", "boost", "find a adult partner", "xxx" :))
narad 15y ago
Related: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/ http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acq... Library of Congress already has an archive of public tweets.
primigenus 15y ago
Wait, so this "article" makes a bunch of claims against Twitter based on zero authoritative links and a bunch of unsourced quotes from ... the Daily Mail? And we're supposed to take this seriously? Come on, doesn't it take more than a bunch of unsubstantiated claims for the HN community to jump on something and just take it at face value?
- hopeless 15y ago
  The only thing that annoys me is twitter won't sell my own archive back to me! I'd happily hand over money for that
Toenex 15y ago
Once upon a time it was the consumer who was confused about what they owned. We all bought vinyl records because it meant we could hear the music we wanted to. We thought this meant we could do what we liked with the music and even though we couldn't the limitations of the technology meant the artist and record company profits never really suffered. One day digital music came along and suddenly our assumptions about what we could do with the music we owned became a serious problem for record company profits and the whole planet shook. Now we have all become artists; our words, our emails, our tweets and posts the new music. The Twitters and the Googles are the new record companies and once more the confusion between music and vinyl has arisen.
viana007 15y ago
Millions of web apps crawling your tweets and you're worried. If you want privacy don't use social medias.
methoddk 15y ago
Twitter is a business, just like any other business, trying to turn a profit. Protect your account if you don't want your public data being pulled. Anyone can make a timeline API request...
islon 15y ago
OMG. They'll know everything I ate the past two years!

52 points by narad 15y ago

Am I the only one not shocked or offended? I post publicly on Twitter. Anyone can do that anyway. … Unless I'm missing something.

mullethunter 15y ago
Agreed. I use twitter as my public micro-blogging/rating/raving platform, and for them to sell data that I assumed was already being pulled by anyone via the API is a non issue to me.
mcdillon 15y ago
The people who are shocked and offended don't understand that they aren't the user of these "free" social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). They / we are in fact the product and once it's realized that your data is being sold to others than you will change the way you interact with the networks.
corin_ 15y ago
The one possible privacy problem that I can see is that they are selling tweets that users can no longer control - if I said something a year ago that I wish I could take back ("Hi everyone, just to let you know I'm gay" or whatever), I'm now unable to delete it, or even review what it was I said, but it can still be sold and tied to me. Still, not something I personally have an issue with, and I suspect not something most people would have an issue with.
gren 15y ago
so true. public is public. Anyone could have data mined all these twitts... But the difficult question that may rise is the "right to delete". IMO it's a hard dilemma: history VS privacy. Can someone decide to delete all its trace and destroy everything he built? On the other hand, we need to keep trace of what's happened in the past, don't you think?

revorad 15y ago

Is there a crowdsourced public archive of tweets? If not, we should build one.

kamjam 15y ago
And then sell it to the big corps for 10% less than twitter... excellent idea :)
lignuist 15y ago
Twitter doesn't allow that: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_recent_changes_to_twitters_terms_of_service_mi.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_recent_changes_to_t...

jond3k 15y ago

"privacy betrayed" -> any of this data was ever private. it wasn't.

zedr 15y ago
Unless you opted to have a private profile. I wonder how if those private tweets are included in the bundle. I agree, however: if you want to keep your thoughts private, don't post them on the Internet. When do you do that, they don't belong to you anymore.
- psquid 15y ago
  > I wonder how if those private tweets are included in the bundle. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022 "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site"
  - zedr 15y ago
    Thanks! I admit not reading TFA.

af3 15y ago

I wonder how it gets over this [1]. [1] http://tweetcc.com/ http://tweetcc.com/

ceejayoz 15y ago
Easily. https://twitter.com/tos https://twitter.com/tos > By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). > You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. > Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services. You can put a CC license on your tweets, and it'll grant those additional copyright rights to anyone, but it doesn't limit what Twitter can do with the content you posted one bit.

ajanuary 15y ago

"Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has erupted as hundreds of companies queue up to purchase users’ personal information from the new database." Is there actually any information in this? What do they mean by believed to be vanished forever? According to the BBC new article [1] "private accounts and tweets that have been deleted will not be indexed by the site." Historically Twitter have been pretty good about ensuring, in their licences at least, things like deleted tweets are deleted even from external archives. It's what makes compiling a database of tweets - even for research purposes - quite difficult. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022

saurik 15y ago
Normal people believe that information that is nearly impossibly difficult to find is as good as gone forever. (This is mostly as these same "normal people" also often don't understand that website scraping can be automated; a sad misapplication of almost-reasonable cost heuristics to a system they don't understand.) However, on Twitter there is an extra wrinkle: neither the site nor the API allow you to go back more than 800 tweets for any view, whether it be "search results matching X" or "tweets that mention me" or "tweets posted by user Y" (the one exception being "your own tweets", where you can go back 3200). This means that if you tweet a lot, it is impossible for another user to go back very far into your history. Even you may not be able to go back that far in your own history. As an example: if you send 20 tweets a day, your history will be inaccessible to you within 6 months, and inaccessible to other users within 6 weeks. Given that this information is seemingly just gone--inaccessible, unable to be found from the user interface of any client, or Twitter's website, or searches on Twitter--while you and I know that they didn't delete it (in fact, Twitter even implies as much in their documentation somewhere: that the 800/3200 are only "temporary" limits), normal people are going to consider that data "vanished forever".
- warp 15y ago
  If you know the id of a tweet you can still access it I believe. https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show.json?id=20 https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show.json?id=20 still works, which allows you to construct https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/20 https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/20 which also still works. So, it's only searches which don't go that far back.

dutchbrit 15y ago

As long as they don't sell DM's or private account tweets, I don't really see the big issue.. By saying that, I mean I'm comfortable with companies having what was already public in the first place.

joezydeco 15y ago
If you were publicly tweeting and then went private just before this database was closed off, would those tweets get out? What if you switched back and forth between private and public a bunch of times? Were those private tweets lost or did they reappear when you went public? My gut says everything stays in the database and it's all being sold.

suking 15y ago

I don't get what you can do with twitter data...

suking 15y ago
Instead of down voting can someone give some examples...
- gizzlon 15y ago
  Company C launched product P on date D.. did mentions go up? Are tweets about company/topic/place/store positive or negative? What do people tweet about when inside our store?
- watty 15y ago
  "analyze tweets posted each day for anything said about their products and services."
fernandose 15y ago
check out datasift, they recently got covered by the press a couple of days on their tweet analysing platform
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
gtani 15y ago
TweetReports, Twazzup, Topsy, and Twitscoop. oneRiot was acquired. http://www.pearltrees.com/#/N-f=1_3785314&N-fa=3689915&N-p=29674375&N-play=0&N-s=1_3785314&N-u=1_428880 http://www.pearltrees.com/#/N-f=1_3785314&N-fa=3689915&#...

hippich 15y ago

95% of these tweets are ones with links to "enlarge", "boost", "find a adult partner", "xxx" :))

narad 15y ago

Related: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/ http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acq... Library of Congress already has an archive of public tweets.

primigenus 15y ago

Wait, so this "article" makes a bunch of claims against Twitter based on zero authoritative links and a bunch of unsourced quotes from ... the Daily Mail? And we're supposed to take this seriously? Come on, doesn't it take more than a bunch of unsubstantiated claims for the HN community to jump on something and just take it at face value?

hopeless 15y ago
The only thing that annoys me is twitter won't sell my own archive back to me! I'd happily hand over money for that

Toenex 15y ago

Once upon a time it was the consumer who was confused about what they owned. We all bought vinyl records because it meant we could hear the music we wanted to. We thought this meant we could do what we liked with the music and even though we couldn't the limitations of the technology meant the artist and record company profits never really suffered. One day digital music came along and suddenly our assumptions about what we could do with the music we owned became a serious problem for record company profits and the whole planet shook. Now we have all become artists; our words, our emails, our tweets and posts the new music. The Twitters and the Googles are the new record companies and once more the confusion between music and vinyl has arisen.

viana007 15y ago

Millions of web apps crawling your tweets and you're worried. If you want privacy don't use social medias.

methoddk 15y ago

Twitter is a business, just like any other business, trying to turn a profit. Protect your account if you don't want your public data being pulled. Anyone can make a timeline API request...

islon 15y ago

OMG. They'll know everything I ate the past two years!