Twitter promoted tweets
Following the success of the promoted tweets revenue model, Twitter is going a step further: They're rolling out the same model onto the iOS and Android version of the platform. The promoted tweets feature--which locks a specific tweet to the top of people's feeds--is already available on the mobile website (mobile.twitter.com). The feature will be rolled out in an update to iPhones and Android-based phones over the next few weeks. Reuters

Starting today, companies can search tweets of any users back to January 2010. This will help them create better marketing plans, target influential users and predict monumental events.

Twitter previously allowed companies to search up to 30 days of tweets. Regular users were only able to search through posts from the past seven days. That all changes today, as the UK-based company DataSift will begin offering a deep archive of Tweets made over the past year.

No-one's ever done this before, DataSift's marketing manager Tim Barker told the BBC. It's a brand new service that we're bringing online -- it's a massive technology challenge because of the amount of data that is pumped out every single day.

DataSift logs roughly 250 million tweets every day. Each tweet is analyzed for content including keywords and whether the tweet has a positive or negative tone. Many have praised DataSift's complex analytical functions including TechCrunch, who said this:

Because DataSift can search for Twitter posts and information using metadata contained in Tweets, the possibilities of mining data at a very specific level are endless. DataSift does not limit searches based on keywords and allows companies of any size to define extremely complex filters, including location, gender, sentiment, language, and even influence based on Klout score, to provide quick and very specific insight and analysis.

Private accounts have not been indexed in the DatSift archives. The BBC reports that DataSift has almost 1,000 companies on a waiting list, and each is extremely eager to join the service.

Twitter--which was formerly chastised for failing to build a source of revenue--will take a small part of DataSift's revenue as part of a licensing fee.

The DataSift tweet archive is being marketed asa way for companies to get a good sense of what's going on in the world, where the public's interest lies, and ways to predict future events such as uprisings or the fall of stock prices.

What appears to be more practical than predicting the future is referring back to the past to determine whether marketing campaigns and products launches have been a success. Of course, the most valuable information on Twitter is the stuff that's being tweeted right now.

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