IBM's Going To Feed Your Tweets To Watson So That Businesses Can Make More Money

IBM and Twitter announced Wednesday a partnership that will see IBM using Twitter data as an input for "multi-variable, pattern-dependent questions like 'What do customers like best about my products?' or 'Why are we growing quickly in Brazil?'" Simply put, IBM will feed the world's tweets into its computers to help businesses better make decisions.

Twitter's extensive and ever-growing collection of human thought will be fed into IBM tools like Watson Analytics and its app-hosting cloud service BlueMix. This means developers will be able to query Twitter's data as they build various apps. IBM will also train 10,000 developers to build Twitter-dependent enterprise apps, and the company has plans to build its own apps in this space. The first will be one to help companies better engage with their customers over Twitter.

"Twitter’s data efforts started when we first made our public data available for analysis. Since then, we’ve made great progress in getting social data into the hands of decision makers," Chris Moody, Twitter's vice president of business development, writes."Our acquisition of Gnip earlier this year was an important milestone because it gives us an enterprise-grade platform that delivers more than 15 billion social activities per day to a vibrant ecosystem of customers and partners who are innovating using this data. As a result, we have a strong platform for data that makes our relationship with IBM possible."

This is far more interesting that having companies simply follow their Twitter mentions to see what people are saying directly to them. IBM hopes to harvest trends and sentiments from the 500 million tweets sent per day.

"Twitter provides a powerful new lens through which to look at the world -- as both a platform for hundreds of millions of consumers and business professionals, and as a synthesizer of trends,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said in a statement. "This is the latest example of how IBM is reimagining work."