Excellent article.

I worked on a project that I integrated with DataSift.

Lorenzo and every one else I emailed with were very quick to respond and the product performed as expected (besides some hiccups that I can easily understand due to growing pains).

Compared to Gnip, (which we also integrated with) DataSift won hands down on both quality of product and customer relations.

However, I'm still suspect of the usefulness of Twitter analytics/ data mining.