It’s a big day for Tweetmeme today. Not only is the London-based company partnering with Twitter on the new, official ‘Twitter button’ (more on that here) but it’s launching a new product – Datasift.
Datasift aims to allow users to make sense of data from Twitter. It will allow developers of Twitter apps such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic to include powerful analysis of Twitter within their services. Blogger Robert Scoble has interviewed Tweetmeme CEO Nick Halstead in a video to coincide with the Datasift launch. In the video (which we’ve embedded below) Halstead describes the service as “Twitter track on steroids”.
Datasift will be a programming language for creating complex searches such as “People in New York with over 200 followers who have mentioned Barack Obama in a positive way with no swearing in the past day”. It’s a potentially incredibly poweful service which isn’t aimed at end users. Instead developers will use the technology to provide advanced new search tools to users.
In his interview with Scoble, Halstead says Twitter has been supportive of Tweetmeme in the development of DataSift. Datasift will be funded in two ways: free streams with built-in ads and ad-free, paid-for streams where developers pay for the volume of content being processed.
In short, this appears to be a truly powerful tool that in time could make Twitter a much more powerful experience. The best way to understand more is to watch Datasift’s launch video and Robert Scoble’s interview with Nick Halstead below.
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