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Information Week, David F. Carr | November 29, 2011
DataSift moved its headquarters from the United Kingdom to San Francisco earlier this month and hired a new CEO, Rob Bailey. Founder Nick Halstead, also founder of TweetMeme, continues to serve as chief technology officer of the firm, which operates TweetMeme as a subsidiary. Where TweetMeme is a consumer website, DataSift calls itself as a platform-as-a-service company--that is, a cloud computing service for building applications.
DataSift has partnered with Lexalytics for sentiment analysis and Klout for influence scores. Meanwhile, the all-important partnership with Twitter was cemented when TweetMeme assisted Twitter with the creation of a Tweet button, modeled on the TweetMeme retweet button.
You can get a sense of what the service can do by signing up for an account on the
DataSift website and learning the basics of the service's scripting language, called the curated stream definition language (CSDL), which is used to query and categorize posts. A Web-based dashboard allows you to test your queries for free, although to capture or export the data you need to be a paying customer.
For example, to see posts mentioning President Obama from relatively influential sources, you could use this:
interaction.content contains "obama" AND klout.score > 50
Read more.
Gregory Piatetsky:
you can see some pre-build streams at
datasift.com/solutions/prebuiltstreams/
DataSift also has several partners, including Endeca, DataMeer, and Trendspottr, and is working on allowing use of the partner tools on their data.