Mining data for fun, for profit and for the greater good

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb.com posted an interesting article today titled: "Four Ad-Free Ways that Mined Data Can Make Money."

This subject strikes close to home for us at Twitalytics and is timely given our second day of operations. Mining data ... specifically mining user sentiment and the pulse of Twitteropia is our mission.

Twitterdom is full of valuable information and beautiful harmonies hidden amongst a cacophony of noise. The uninitiated to Twitter can not possibly understand the value of wading through so much chaff to get to the wheat. But the question we at Twitalytics ask is simple: is it possible to mine through the layers of stone to find the precious gems and then polish them up in byte size pieces of 14o characters for rapid consumption??

Rhetorical question. Obviously we think we can.

But how does one make money on Twitter? This is a work in progress. Those who tweet often may be using the platform as a marketing vehicle to drive traffic to their respective web sites. For now, that is pretty much all we can hope for as well. But one thing remains true on the web. If you create enough value, the money will follow.

We are confident that our mission of mining tweets for the good stuff will be welcomed as a valuable service by many. We hope you agree.

PS: We welcome ReadWriteWeb.com as the first member of our blogroll.

Day One

August 23, 2008 was the first full day of operation for Twitalytics
It may be interesting to note that the idea and energy behind this effort was conceived and hatched on the same day. There wasn't any time invested in researching a business plan, or writing a requirements document. It went from idea to execution in less than two hours.

The idea is a simple one.
Strive to digest and put a human voice on the stream of Twitter consciousness. No judgement or bias. Just capture what people are finding interesting enough to post tweets about and when it begins to show velocity and interest, quickly represent the stream as a part of the collective consciousness with a single tweet.

What was accomplished?
After "marketing" the arrival of Twitalytics by following as many people as possible (the limit turned out to be 2000), an audience of 53 followers emerged. These are people who followed Twitalytics for the simple reason that Twitalytics followed them first. By the end of the day, 18 people blocked our follow. Not too shabby -- a 2.5% follow rate and 0.9% block rate. We also received 2 replies and 6 direct messages.

The goal was to post an average of one twitalytic per hour. 23 posts were made from about 11am until midnight exceeding that goal by a factor of 2. Let's see if the two an hour average is a more appropriate target or not.

What was the stream of consciousness posted on day one?

1. Obama's announcement of Joe Biden as his running mate at 3am in the morning and the fact the first tweet about it didn't come from the Obama camp. Instead, it was @ohioBNN who quoted NaugBlog who cited Drudge Report. Meanwhile, the democratic troops were converging in Denver, CO for the start of the Democratic National Convention 2008 (DNC08).
2. Later in the day, Obama and Biden spoke in Springfield, IL which ABC aired by pre-empting its television coverage of the American championship of the Little League World Series. Waipio, Hawaii won the game. There was an immediate outpouring for support of the VP choice hugely outnumbering nay-sayers.
3. Gnomedex 8.0 was in full swing and there was much activity from that conference. The first attention getter of the morning was Sarah Lacey's keynote address. Tweeters were wondering if this would this be a repeat of Sarah Lacey's interview of Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW? It wasn't. The silence was deafening. A few product demonstrations at Gnomedex did make some noise however: Adeona (software you install on your laptop to help aid recovery following loss or theft); Boxee (an xbox media player, available for Mac OS X and Linux. Let's you create and share TV channels); and TweetDeck (an Adobe Air app that let's you monitor Twitter streams. Enables grouping, searching and a view of trending topics on TwitScoop -- a product that your humble author found very appealing and apparently so did one of our followers).
4. There were many who twittered about receiving text messages from AT&T who encouraged these iPhone users to upgrade their firmware. The announcement that the iPhone 3G would be available in 22 more countries generated some activity.
5. Tropical Storm Fay hammered Florida by making landfall for a record 4th time before finally leaving at the end of the day and heading for Alabama.
6. Folks were glued to their TVs watching the Bristol NASCAR race and the Olympics marathon run. They also went to see Tropic Thunder (they loved it) and Death Race (had mixed reviews).
7. Also of interest on TV was the Rick Sanchez interview of Joe Biden on CNN. This got plenty of attention on Twitter since Rick Sanchez was fielding questions/comments from Twitterland to @ricksanchezcnn.

A very exciting and educational day one. Tomorrow, we'll share some of the tools we're using.