Digging up the past on Twitter

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The number of active users on Twitter is nowhere close to the active number of users on Facebook. But what it lacks in strength, it makes up for in activity — over 450 million tweets are created every day, way more than the number of posts and status messages people put up on Facebook.

So, what if, for reference’s sake, you wanted to go through your history for tweets on a specific topic? Oops! With the billions of tweets, real-time news and updates, now that exercise might be a bit of a Herculean task — the proverbial needle in a haystack.
That needn’t be the case anymore, thanks to Topsy, a San Francisco-based social analytics company, which aims to change that. Topsy offers advanced Twitter search tools for the microblogging network’s entire stream, which is known as the Twitter ‘firehose’.
Topsy has been partnering with Twitter for providing a range of Twitter-related statistics. In USA, during last year’s presidential race, Twitter’s political index — or popularly known as the Twindex — used Topsy’s analytics features to determine public sentiment for each candidate. Twitter gauged if the public had a positive or negative view of certain politicians using information fetched from publicly available tweets. It even went one step further to classify the public reaction geographically by breaking down tweet locations right till the city level.
In August, Topsy opened its API (application programming interface) to developers, allowing them to use Twitter data more creatively in other applications. But more recently, to show what the Topsy’s search tools are capable of, the company opened up an archive of Twitter’s entire history to the public — a collection of more than a staggering 425 billion tweets, videos, images, blog posts and location pins, including founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet in 2006.
This new, all-encompassing archive could benefit a wide variety of people — consumer goods marketing analysts, musicians and even politicians. A political campaign, for example, can gauge the public opinion surrounding a specific issue during the previous presidential race by searching Topsy’s archives. All the raw, important wealth of information is available to the public at Topsy’s website.