挖掘Twitter数据：打破沙锅问到底

    2006年13岁的那些人如今已20岁了。他们中不少人恐怕都想删除一些网络历史记录，特别是那些自己十几岁时在Twitter上发布的信息：比方说，现在着迷于2 Chainz的人，七年前可能还在一遍遍地发Twitter说，多么喜欢Fall Out Boy乐队的热门单曲《Dance Dance》。

    如今他们过去发布的这些Twitter消息都能搜索到，自从Twitter成立以来每条微博都能被搜索到，这太糟了。社交媒体索引和分析公司Topsy周三宣布，已经对Twitter成立以来的每条微博建立了索引——总共有4,250亿条内容，包括链接至微博的图片和页面。此前，索引只能追溯到2010年。

    这项服务是免费的。用户可以对这些内容进行各种各样的操作，包括缩短时间参数以及将结果图表化。根据Topsy的算法，用户也可以按微博转发量和某一Twitter用户的受关注程度进行排名。

    营销和社交专家无疑会寻找方式利用所有这些可能已被遗忘的数据——甚至是那些非常久远的信息，那些初看起来可能不是特别有价值的信息。但数据研究人员为了研究购车习惯这样的行为需要追溯的时间远远超过7年。Twitter发布的时间越久，这些数据对于研究消费者偏好或政客人气等内容就越有价值。

    Topsy大部分收入来自出售高端和细化数据分析工具，包括将微博按发布地区或对比条件细分的数据。注册用户每月最低支付1,000美元的费用就可获得这些服务。

    顺便说一下，对于Fall Out Boy有个好消息：过去30天有273,000条微博到了这支乐队的名字。（财富中文网）   

    People who were 13 years old in 2006 are 20 now. Many of them no doubt would like to erase much of their online histories, especially the stuff they wrote on Twitter in their early-teen years: say, somebody who's now a fan of 2 Chainz, but who seven years ago tweeted over and over again about how much they loved Fall Out Boy's "Dance Dance."

    Too bad, because those tweets from the past are all accessible, along with every other tweet ever written since Twitter launched in 2006. The social-media indexing and analysis firm Topsy announced on Wednesday that it had indexed every tweet from the beginning -- in all, about 425 billion pieces of content including pictures and pages linked from tweets. Before now, the index had reached back only to 2010.

    The service is free. Users can do all kinds of things with it, such as narrow time parameters and graph results. Topsy's algorithms allow ranking in terms of the number of retweets and the popularity of a particular Twitter user.

    Marketers and social scientists will no doubt find ways to make use of all that data that haven't even been thought of yet -- even the really old stuff, which at first blush might not appear to be particularly valuable. But data researchers go back a lot further than seven years all the time to study things like car-buying habits. The older Twitter gets, the more valuable the data will be for studying things like consumer sentiment or reactions to politicians.

    Topsy makes most of its revenue from selling access to high-end, more granular data-analysis tools which include things like breaking down tweets by geographic origin or comparing terms. Subscribers pay a minimum of $1,000 a month for those services.

    Good news, by the way, for Fall Out Boy: The band's name has been tweeted 273,000 times in the past 30 days.