newjerseynewsroom.com

BY BOB HOLT

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Do you enjoy reading the latest in business information along with Ashton Kutcher's mood from Twitter? Is yours among the 250 million tweets that are sent every day?

In an effort to gain revenue from its site that is used by an estimated 300 million people, CNN reports that Twitter has archived all of its Tweets, and has formed an agreement with UK-based company Datasift to have access to all postings since January 2010.

According to Mashable, DataSift Historics, allows companies to take insights and trends relating to brands, businesses, markets, news and public opinion. The company will only analyze public tweets.

Datasift claims to have a waiting list of over 1,000 clients wanting to analyze the tweets.

Privacy groups are unhappy about the deal. Most users had been under the impression that tweets were no longer available to those outside their followers network after a week.

Gus Hosein, of Privacy International, told Mail Online: "Twitter has turned a social network meant to promote global conversation into a vast market-research enterprise with unwilling, unpaid participants." Justin Basini, of data privacy group Allow, said: "This shows all those throwaway tweets have suddenly become a rich new revenue stream for Twitter. It has taken a stream of consciousness, analysed it, bottled it and sold it for a profit.”

Mediabistro.com reports that Twitter users can get rid of their old tweets through third party services. TwitWipe lets users delete all of their tweets by clicking a confirmation button. And TweetEraser, allows you to filter tweets you want to delete by date or keyword.

Twitter, a private company, earns most of its money through advertising. They are estimated to earn about $259.9 million in 2012 and $399.5 million next year.