Twitter sells old tweets to businesses

Twitter might be in a wee bit of trouble, as it was discovered that the micro blogging company has made some money off its old tweets of users through the sales of those to businesses. Around 7 million people in Britain rely on Twitter to post short messages to their ‘followers’, and most users believe that their tweets remain unavailable to those who are not in the same network as them after a week, because those tweets can no longer be searched for. I guess that is not the case, since Twitter did archive all tweets to date (which is no mean task considering around 250 million tweets are archived each day), and actually enabled UK-based Datasift to go through the entire gamut of posted tweets since January 2010.

Datasift needs this information, as they intend to leverage it in order to assist firms with marketing campaigns as well as place influential users within their crosshair. This deal is part of Twitter’s masterplan to gain even more revenue from its free service, but the question is this – is it ethical? Who would have thought that something like this would have happened? I guess there is nothing sacred on the Internet these days, so be careful where you place your digital thoughts.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Twitter