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nharada

"may become profitable for the first time next quarter after ... ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies"

Cool, so any indication on who is buying all my data?

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They’ve acquired the company Gnip a few years ago, which then became the exclusive reseller of Twitter firehose data.

Their biggest competitor is Datasift, which has similar exclusive deals with Facebook and Linkedin.

There’s an incredibly big market here, with customers ranging from social media analytics companies to investment firms.

TIL marketing to bots is a thing. /s

Like any other media platform there's advantages and disadvantages. Twitter is fantastic if you're trying to reach media professionals or developers in my experience.

When they bought GNIP they ended their partnership with DataSift. It was a major blow to DataSift. It was a shrewd move on Twitter's part. My company switched over to using GNIP and our DataSift sales rep told us tons of other customers switched too and that he was leaving because of it.

Yep, that’s correct. The recent lawsuit against LinkedIn about crawling [1] is interesting, though. It sets the precedent that third parties cannot be blocked from crawling, which technically means anyone could do this with Twitter as well.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft-linked...

"ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies, which could help to break its reliance on advertising for revenue." i.e. "we don't know how to profit from this user data ourselves, so we'll sell it to people who know how."

More like, “we’ve analyzed our data to death and know it’s not worth beans, but we don’t have to tell anyone else that, and there’s a sucker born every minute who thinks they can beat the stock market by squinting at this-or-that data firehose just right, so we’re happy to charge them for the attempt.”

Why trust their answer anyway? If this concerns you, you should switch to Mastodon.

Mastodon looks promising. It definitely has traction.

I wonder if FBI/Secret Service swoop in to prevent the President's data from being sold in these cases. Or if they restrict its use/sale by other platforms as well.

He's made it clear that he values his phone more than he does national security, they don't have the ability to intercede.

I am not saying they would take his phone or remove his account, but that they would restrict Twitter from using/selling his data.

I doubt they'd single out his data, but twitter may restrict the sale of data for everyone with a lil check mark. (Just speculation).

The feds don't have that ability either... Twitter could out of courtesy, but that would create a bad precedent.

Some information is on this page:

https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data

"Interests from partners

Twitter's partners build audiences around shopping decisions, lifestyle, and other online and offline behaviors.

Tailored audiences

Tailored audiences are often built from email lists or browsing behaviors. They help advertisers reach prospective customers or people who have already expressed interest in their business."

I would assume they are selling data without personally identifiable information so it isn't your data. You are a set of data points that is aggregated with the millions of other users.

Also: What data is being bought? Publicly available information bundled up so there's not hassle with gathering it would be ok IMO.

Private data would spark my interest as well. They can't be selling DMs, can't they?

If somebody says "Emails": What are they used for then by the buyer?

Things I can think of: Broadcast a tv spot, then measure how much hashtag mentions it generates. Find regions where people are more receptive to your product based on Twitter sentiment. Filter for stock mentions and use it for your trading bot.

They used to sell the “firehose,” which I believe was a real-time feed of every single tweet (something not available from the normal API). I don’t know if that still exists.

Gnip used to do this. But twitter purchased them and now runs the product. This is still a thing.

They do to some extent, there was a great talk at Strange Loop this year about the architecture of that system.

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