Twitter-powered Space Invaders game demos DataSift’s social search tech

As we reported earlier today, UK-based social search service DataSift has secured $6m in funding to expand its Twitter-sanctioned social data search platform for power users and developers who want to create complex searches across the social Web.

As a demo of the platform, DataSift has just launched a rather cool Web app called DataSift Invaders. It’s like Space Invaders but powered by Twitter-related data such as sentiment analysis and rankings from the likes of Klout and PeerIndex.

Here’s how it works:

0.01% of all real-time tweets are sampled and sentiment analysis used to move the DataSift ship.

When any user tweets with a Klout or Peerindex score higher than 75 the DataSift ship will shoot.

What’s more, the more positive the sentiment in a tweet, the fast it will move on the screen. It’s billed as ‘Twitter versus DataSift’ and every time the DataSift ship hits a Twitter avatar 1 point is given, while every time a Twitter avatar makes it to the bottom of the screen 1 point is granted to Twitter.

The game may not have you playing for hours, but it’s an impressive demo of how social data can be mined in real time and presented in new and interesting ways.