Datasift says goodbye to its Twitter data access

Data reseller Datasift said today that its access to Twitter’s firehose is ending.

In a post on the corporate blog entitled “Twitter Ends its Partnership with DataSift,” CEO and founder Nick Halstead said his company’s customers will have access to Twitter data until August 13 of this year.

“This is an extremely disappointing result to us and the ecosystem of companies we have helped to build solutions around Twitter data,” he wrote.

Last Spring, Twitter bought data reseller Gnip, which was one of three big Twitter data resellers. The other two were Datasift and NTT Data.

In a post Friday on its blog, Gnip’s Twitter ecosystem head Zach Hofer-Shall wrote that “the acquisition of Gnip was the first step [by Twitter] toward developing more direct relationships with data customers.”

He added that the next step “in working directly with data customers is to transition everyone receiving raw data for commercial use from other data resellers to a direct relationship with Twitter.” This was a process begun with the purchase of Gnip, Hofer-Shall said, “and we expect to finish the transition by the middle of August of this year.” Since becoming a public company, Twitter has faced pressure to increase its sources of revenue.

Halstead noted that nearly 90 percent of his customers use Datasift to “access data from multiple social networks,” and pointed to his company’s recent partnership with Facebook.

He said “80 percent of our customers use our advanced processing capabilities” that are not available from the direct Twitter/GNIP feed. These include, he said, integration options into business intelligence platforms and automatic categorization based on meaning or sentiment.